Dave, the business of financing San Diego businesses must be awfully quiet these days :)[/quote]
The banking business in San Diego is the best I’ve seen in over 15 years… so long as you have a lot of capital and don’t have a bunch of crappy loans on your balance sheet. The little bank I’m involved with here was one of only four in San Diego that received a 5-star Bauer rating this year. With that and the failure of San Diego National, we’re getting business left and right. And the terms on loans are the best I can remember – we won’t do anything north of a 50% LTV (based on revised cap rates) without an unlimited personal guarantee. We have no non-performing loans and no charge-offs. The industry’s paying virtually nothing on deposits. It simply couldn’t be better. But… it took us three years after we opened our doors to get to this point, so we spent quite some time hunkering down and doing very little. In fact, hysterically in hindsight, we were dinged on our first regulatory exam in 2007 for “not making enough loans.” We explained our rationale (that the market was insane) and our examiners frowned and said, “well, try to do better.” Which we ignored until about six months ago.
