Northeast Bank (NASDAQ:NBN) Q2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript January 31, 2024
Northeast Bank isn't one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).
Operator: Welcome to the Northeast Bank Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2024 Earnings Call. My name is Daniel, and I will be your operator for today's call. This call is being recorded. With us today from the Bank is Rick Wayne, President and Chief Executive Officer; JP Lapointe, Chief Financial Officer; and Pat Dignan, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer. Yesterday, an investor presentation was uploaded to the Bank's website, which we will reference in this morning's call. The presentation can be accessed at the Investor Relations section of northeastbank.com under Events and Presentations. You may find it helpful to download this investor presentation and follow along during the call. Also, this call will be available for rebroadcast on the website for future use.
At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later we will conduct a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, the conference is being recorded. Please note that this presentation contains forward-looking statements about Northeast Bank. Forward-looking statements are based upon the current expectations of Northeast Bank's management and are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those discussed in the forward-looking statements. Northeast Bank does not undertake any obligations to update any forward-looking statements. I will now turn the call over to Rick Wayne. Mr. Wayne, you may begin.
Rick Wayne: Thank you very much. Good morning to those of you listening to the call. This morning, I want to go over a few of the interesting and important results during the quarter, and I'm not going to go over line by line what's already in the earnings release because I'm sure that you have read that or that you will read that. But I just want to spend a little bit on Page 3 of the slides. First, talking about the loan volume in the quarter. The purchased loans activity of $186.1 million invested on $208 million of UPB or 89.5% purchase price is our second strongest purchase quarter only behind the approximate $1 billion of loans purchased one year ago, so very, very strong. And on that topic, on the purchase loan market, we’re seeing a fair amount of good, very good supply in the marketplace and so we're looking at a lot.
I would caution you that they are binary, you bid and you win or you don't win, but there seems to be a fair amount of supply in the marketplace. On the origination slide perspective, we originated $63.5 million of loans, which is, it's not that it's a bad number, but it's kind of a loan number consistent with the trend over the prior quarters. I can say that as we sit here today, the origination volume is picking up and I would expect that we will have higher numbers in the current quarter than we had in the quarter that ended December 31. The weighted average rate on our entire loan portfolio, originated loan portfolio was 9.45%, which is very strong. And then just to take a look at some of the quick stats, our net income was $14.1 million.
And that was after we charged off $957,000, about almost a $1 million of a deferred tax asset due to changes in the way Massachusetts sets out their – or will set out their apportionment factor. So the income was very strong and the EPS was $1.85, return on equity was 17.35%, return on assets was 1.93% and tangible book value has grown to just a few pennies under $42 at $41.97. If we go now to Slide 8, which I am going to, I want to make a few comments on asset quality. First, you can see that there was a jump in nonperforming loans in the quarter that just ended from the previous quarter. That's principally due to three loans that went on non-accrual in the quarter. Kind of the headline is we don't think that we're going to have on those.
And do we think they'll be resolved without any principal loss? A couple of them were kind of typical purchase loans or typical loans in national lending where they go late and then we resolve them, plenty of collateral coverage. And the first one for about $6 million is a dispute over lien position, our mortgage and others. And it's in the courts and in the event that we were to lose that, we have title insurance. That's why I say I don't expect to have any principal loss from these loans that are now are non-accrual. I also want to bring your attention to the bottom right corner of Page 8, where we take a look at net charge-offs. CECL has caused us to – has required that we change the treatment of purchased loans, which has an impact on how we report charge-offs.
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And I think the best way to make this point is to give you an example. Given a pool of loans, let us say, there was a loan that had a $50,000 customer balance, but when we bid for the loan along with a bunch of other loans, we allocated $0 to it. We got the loan, but we didn't pay anything for it. Under pre-CECL, we would just carry that loan at zero because we didn't pay anything for it. But in the case of CECL, you're now required to carry that loan, show the loan at $50,000 with a corresponding allowance of $50,000. So it nets to zero. And at some point, if we charge-off that loan, then it shows that $50,000 would show as a charge-off, even though we didn't have any principal allocated to that. So keeping in mind, those new rules under CECL, you'll see that.
And there's a footnote on this. In the case of quarters ending September 30 and also on December 31, out of the 0.7% of 930 or 7 basis points, 6 basis points of that was a number attributable to CECL, which as I described, there was no loss of principal. It's just the way you have to report it for accounting. So there was only one basis of charge offs in September 30. And for December 31, the same point that we're showing 11 basis points here or 0.11%, but out of that 11 basis points, 9 basis points are as a result of CECL, where there was really no loss of principal. So if you strip that out from those two numbers, the charge offs for the quarter ending September 30 was 1 basis point, and on December 31 was two basis points, not much at all.
That's way in the weeds, but because it's a change, I just wanted to try and explain that for you. If we now move on to Slide 9, this is a slide that shows the change in the non-performing loans from September 30 to December 30 – I mean, from September 30, 2023 to – September 30, 2023, part, sorry for that, to December 31, 2023. And you can see, it's gone up from 17 point around here, $5 million to $30.7 million. And most of that are the three loans designated one, two, and three, which I spoke about just a couple of minutes ago. And then there's another one on designated as number four for $1.1 million, which subsequent to quarter end was paid off in full, which is my expectation for the other ones as well. I do want to comment on page – on the deposit on interest rates starting on Page 15.
And you can see that for the quarter, our quarterly cost of deposits was 4.16% and continuing the upward march of rates and the spot rate on the last day of the quarter was 4.23%. The good news around our funding is we're starting to see our cost coming down. And we have, for example, $700 million brokered CDs maturing over the next six months, which at today's rates, we could replace at a 40 basis point savings, which is quite substantial. And I also want to highlight on Page 16, that looking at what's happened by channel in our deposits over the last year and the main point I want to make is that in our banking centers, we have seven that our deposits in those banking centers have gone up by $216 million. We're 38% from a year ago, which we're really happy about.
And we're continuing to build those core deposits in our branches as a way of replacing higher cost deposits and other categories. Finally, I do want to comment on the expenses on Page 19 that have gone up from the linked quarter about $300,000. It's mostly in the compensation line. In December, we gave every employee in the bank, I would say, other than Pat and me, $1,000 each for the year – end of the year was about $200,000, well deserved by our great team and built morale, increased morale. Everyone was excited about that. And then also in this quarter, we had a full quarter of stock compensation, we make stock grants typically in August. And so for the preceding quarter, it was only half a quarter that was recorded of that expense. And in the current – the quarter ending December 31, it was a full quarter.
So that's about $400,000 of the difference. And then we had some savings in some other areas. And I do want to say, before we turn it over to any questions that if they – this is in some ways it's a bittersweet day for us, it's sweet because we had another really great quarter. It's bitter because JP is some who many of you have talked to, I know and like and respected, is leaving our bank to take a position at another bank after being with us six years. He will be missed by everyone. He's really built a great group. We have the privilege of working with him day in and day out. He's really a first rate person. He's a good father and a good husband. His colleagues like and respect him and the quality of his work is extraordinary. And so we will miss him.
But he will be part of our Alumni club and we will all get to see him a lot, I hope. And so today is his last day. He’s been totally professional. He gave notice maybe six weeks ago or seven weeks ago and has worked diligently every single day. And so we all wish him every success. I don’t have to say the best of luck. He doesn’t need luck. He will be successful, but he will be missed. And on that note, we’d like to turn it over and see if there are any questions at all.
