Gold Coast Bank 1Q earnings off; assets up
“As we’ve increased our loans significantly, we’ve also increased our money market and checking accounts,” Joseph Perri, president and chief executive of Gold Coast Bank, said. (Sept. 15, 2011) Credit: Heather Walsh
Gold Coast Bank, one of the Island's newest and smallest, said Monday its earnings in the first quarter fell by eight percent from a year earlier, skewed by a stock sale gain in the quarter last year.
Assets at the young bank grew to $160 million on March 31, up 27 percent from a year earlier.
The privately held bank, based in Islandia, said net income was $306,000 or 14 cents a share in the three months ended March 31. The per share amount was a penny less than a year earlier. But the bank said the quarter last year included $283,000 of securities gains.
Core earnings for the quarter -- pretax and excluding securities gains -- were up 330 percent to $215,000.
Total loans outstanding at the end of the quarter totaled $92 million, an increase of 24 percent from a year earlier.
Total deposits were $141 million, up $33 million or 30 percent. "As we've increased our loans significantly, we've also increased our money market and checking accounts, which are low cost sources of funding," president and chief executive Joseph G. Perri said in an interview. The bank specializes in commercial loans and, about a year ago, Perri promised a local business group that the bank would lend $20 million to small businesses, hopefully within six months. Perri said Monday it took just about a year to write that $20 million in loans, though it has been partly offset, to a net of about $15 million, by paydowns of some other business loans.
The bank booked no provision for loan losses in the first quarter of this year -- that is, it added nothing to its allowance for loan losses, which was $1,270,529 or 1.37 percent of total loans as of March 31. Perri said it had added to the fund on a conservative basis in previous quarters. The bank had no nonperforming loans at March 31, 2012.
Gold Coast plans to open its fourth branch in Farmingdale Thursday or Friday and a fifth in Mineola around the end of June, Perri said. It has branches now in Setauket, Islandia and Huntington.
Gold Coast swung to a profit of $828,000 for 2011 from a loss of $630,000 in 2010.
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