Banks take over where builders left off

At a time when dozens of Northwest banks are trying to dig themselves out of the mess left by the collapse of the housing bubble, City Bank of Lynnwood is attempting to build itself out. Literally.

AutumnWood at BrookTree in Tacoma, a gated development for "active adults age 55 or better," had just seven or eight houses on its 117 lots when City Bank repossessed it last year. Rather than trying to sell the mostly empty project as is, City Bank hired builders and is gradually filling it in. Eight new homes are now under construction.

It's one of several developments taken back by City Bank from delinquent builders and developers. The bank plans to build and sell starter homes on the land, aiming to minimize its losses on the soured loans.

"If a builder has run out of cash, to the point where he can't make payroll, he's not going to be willing or able" to complete the project, said Marty Heimbigner, City Bank's chief executive. "But we feel we have the right team, with the necessary resources, to get the job done. That's why we like to foreclose and get title into the bank's hands — we like to be in control."

The recession has forced local banks to take on far more delinquent properties than they can easily dispose of, especially in a weak market. A sample of 53 Washington banks and thrifts examined by The Seattle Times collectively held $894.6 million in real estate as of Sept. 30, the most recent date for which figures are available. That's almost four times what they had a year earlier.

Not only do empty houses, condos and lots bring in zero revenue, they're expensive to manage, keep up and eventually sell off. And seldom, if ever, do such properties sell for the amount of the original loan.

So banks are taking new, more aggressive steps to get real estate off their books.

Last year, Washington Federal of Seattle and Sterling Savings of Spokane set up extensive online listings of bank-owned properties, many with special financing deals. First Savings Bank Northwest of Renton created a real-estate team from scratch because until last quarter the bank had never foreclosed on anyone.

And Banner Bank of Walla Walla is pitching a deal it hopes will keep its builder-borrowers from defaulting on loans: Consumers who buy a qualifying Banner-financed home are guaranteed that if they lose their job within the first two years, the bank will pay their mortgage (up to $1,500) for up to six months.

"This way, we sell a house, the builder gets paid, his (subcontractors) get paid, and we get paid," Banner Senior Vice President Ken Larsen said.

Banks across the country have had to adopt innovative approaches to dealing with problematic real-estate assets, said Joe Waites, a partner in Minerva Consulting, a Georgia-based firm that helps troubled banks.

Waites said he helped one bank sell land that had been platted for homes — with streets, sidewalks and sewer connections already completed — to a local school district for a new high school. Another bank converted a vacant warehouse to office space.

Banks typically come to own developments the same way they come to own houses: Developers or builders who've used the property as collateral default on their loans. The borrower may surrender the property voluntarily to the bank, or the bank can take it through foreclosure.

City Bank, a heavy lender to residential developers and builders during the boom, has the most acute problem. Among the 53-bank sample, City Bank had by far the biggest pile of idle real estate relative to its size — and that was after selling off 934 homes in the first nine months of the year, 13.5 percent of all newly built homes sold in the Puget Sound region.

At the end of 2009, City Bank found itself with some 2,800 vacant building lots, mostly in Snohomish and Pierce counties. The only real alternative to building homes on the lots, Heimbigner said, was selling them to bottom-feeding investors looking to buy on the cheap.

"I get calls every day from people who want to buy our real estate, and I'm thinking, 'If so many people want to buy our real estate for what it's being carried on our books, maybe I should hold onto it,' " he said.

So City Bank is contracting with builders — in some cases the same ones who defaulted on their loans — to build out the lots. The bank is working with a dozen real-estate agents to sell the houses; Heimbigner said the bank will be careful not to flood the market.

"We sell five houses, we build five more," he said. "We work our way through the plats very systematically."

After selling 1,180 houses and lots in 2009, City Bank said Friday, it recouped all but about 10 percent of the original aggregate $360 million loan amount.

It will take a year to 18 months for City Bank to get the "most difficult" properties off its portfolio, Heimbigner said.

But Waites cautioned that in their zeal to get rid of unwanted real estate, unwary banks can cause themselves even more trouble. In Georgia, he said, banks building homes "has been a recipe for failure" because the banks lost money on each sale.

"You can only do that for a certain amount of time before you wipe out your capital," he said. "It's a way of getting it off your books, but at the cost of increasing your losses."

Some local banks now have online property listings that would rival a decent-sized realty office's.

Sterling Savings (and its smaller corporate sibling, Golf Savings Bank of Mountlake Terrace) lists 375 properties on its Web site. They range from a $2.4 million mansion in tony Lake Oswego, Ore., to three empty lots in Caldwell, Idaho, for $19,900 apiece.

For the 258 properties on its site, Washington Federal is offering 30-year fixed rate mortgages at 4.74 percent, as long as you put 20 percent down and actually live in the house. (Investors pay 1.5 percentage points more, reflecting the higher risk on nonowner-occupied houses.)

All this is new territory for Victor Karpiak, chief executive of First Financial Northwest, the parent of First Savings Bank of Renton. The bank foreclosed on about two dozen properties — mainly single-family homes in King County — worth $11.8 million last quarter; Karpiak created a four-person division to deal with it.

"Historically we have never had any (real estate), because we've always worked with our customers," he said. "We never even had a collections department, because our asset quality was so good."

But by the tail end of 2009 some builders "had given up," Karpiak said. "They weren't trying to liquidate their inventory, so we had to take more aggressive steps."

That inventory will take four to six months to liquidate, Karpiak said, depending on how many more properties First Savings takes over in the meantime.

But he takes some comfort in the fact that local housing prices, while not rising, mostly seem to have stopped going down.

"We feel we're going to be selling when the market conditions have stabilized," he said. "There won't be any fire sales."

Drew DeSilver: 206-464-3145 or ddesilver@seattletimes.com