A Florida bank was the first casualty of the new year. A Pennsylvania bank, meanwhile, decided to shutter a mortgage banking operation with more than a hundred employees.
The Florida Office of Financial Regulation stepped in Friday and seized First Commercial Bank of Florida. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. took over as receiver and sold the failed institution to First Southern Bank.
First Commercial was founded in 1999. It employed 87 people. Its $599 million in assets included $51million in home loans, $278 million in commercial mortgages and $111 million in construction-and-land-development loans. Deposits were $530 million.
The Orlando-based company entered a formal agreement with the Federal Reserve in October. Another formal agreement was made with the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, State of Florida Office of Financial Regulation in March 2010.
The FDIC agreed to share losses on $484 million of First Commercial. The resulting losses to its Deposit Insurance Fund are projected at $78 million. The deposits were picked up at par.
First Commercial was the first federally insured bank failure of 2011.
No. 2 was Legacy Bank, a 20-employee institution in Scottsdale, Ariz.
The six-year-old bank was closed Friday by the Arizona Department of Financial Institutions.
In May 2010, the FDIC issued a prompt corrective action against Legacy.
Enterprise Bank & Trust took over Legacy, paying a 1.0 percent premium for its $126 million in deposits and negotiating a $120 million loss-sharing agreement with the FDIC on the company’s $151 million in assets. One- to four-family residential holdings were $38 million, commercial real estate assets were $18 million and C&D loans were $40 million.
FDIC losses from Legacy were predicted to come in at $28 million.
By the end of April, mortgage banking activities at American Home Bank will be over, according to a filing by parent Tower Bancorp Inc. with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Harrisburg, Pa.-based Tower picked up the Mountville, Pa.-based mortgage operation with its Dec. 10 acquisition of First Chester County Corp. and First National Bank of Chester County.
“Prior to its acquisition of First Chester, Tower concluded that the multi-state residential mortgage banking business of the AHB Division was incompatible with Tower’s relationship-based community banking business model,” the filing stated. “Accordingly, the merger agreement between Tower and First Chester required that First Chester use its best efforts to sell the AHB Division at or prior to the effective date of the merger, which efforts were ultimately unsuccessful.”
On the business networking site Linkedin, American Home Bank shows a total of 141 employees.
A related restructuring charge of between $5 million and $5.6 million will be taken by the parent company, including $1.6 million in one-time employment related termination benefits.
Tower will continue to originate home loans through its Graystone Tower Bank subsidiary’s mortgage unit, Graystone Mortgage LLC.
