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A downtown Sarasota patch of grass once used for lunchtime food trucks is the latest sign the banking industry is hungry for a bigger piece of the economic recovery.
This one comes from Sabal Palm Bank. Bank president and CEO Neil McCurry recently announced the lender, with $125 million in assets through June, will be the anchor tenant of the four-story Sabal Palm Plaza. The 30,000-square-foot office complex, from prominent developer Dr. Mark Kauffman, will be built on the south side of Ringling Boulevard, just west of U.S. 301. The site has been deserted for a few years, but was once home to food trucks that sold cheeseburger sliders and fish tacos.
The building, the resurrection of a project sidelined in 2007 by the recession, will likely be ready for occupancy in fall 2017. But McCurry says the bank will leave its current facility, on Fruitville Road near Interstate 75, and move into temporary downtown offices by the end of the year.
The move downtown, says McCurry, will fulfill a CEO vision statement he gave to Sabal board members in January 2013, soon after he was hired. Not being downtown, he told the board, would set up the bank to miss out on multiple opportunities.
“But several years ago we were stuck with a lot of nonperforming assets,” McCurry tells Coffee Talk. “We had to get to a point where we had enough business that could make this work.”
That point, says McCurry, has arrived. Assets are up 50% in the two years since McCurry was named CEO. And second quarter pre-tax earnings at Sabal Palm are up 19% over the first quarter, to $122,017. Year-to-date earnings are $224,480. One area in particular Sabal Plam has done well in is homeowners association banking services. That was also a niche McCurry had in the early 2000s when he ran Sarasota's People's Community Bank.
Sabal Plam, which plans to occupy two floors of the building, is busy in other ways. McCurry is getting ready for a March capital raise that could bring in at least $4 million. Sabal Palm is also in the early stages of forming a bank holding company, so it could raise capital more often and own subsidiaries. Says McCurry: “We have a lot of balls in the air.”
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