Charter Bank, Santa Fe - Retail/Wholesale, Commercial and Warehouse

The following is excerpted from a 2010-01-26 article in National Mortgage News (subscription):

"The seizure on Jan. 22 of Charter Bank, Santa Fe, by the Office of Thrift Supervision, underlines what could be a new trend in the mortgage business -- lenders involved in both residential and commercial mortgage lending brought low by a double dip in two bad markets.

Charter Bank, New Mexico's largest state-based mortgage lender, escaped the subprime mortgage disaster with no problem. Indeed, no New Mexico-based financial institutions failed during the subprime crisis, because they left that kind of lending by and large to out-of-state institutions, which did fail.

With $905 million in mortgages originated in 2008 ($622 million in-state), Charter was a top 200 mortgage lender. But the swift deterioration of the commercial mortgage business, following so soon on the residential crisis, seems to be proving a potent foe to institutions that do both kinds of lending."

Charter Bank, Santa Fe was the seventh bank failure for 2010 and "the first in New Mexico since 1999" according to an article in New Mexico Business Weekly. In addition to residential single family mortgages, Charter Bank offered multifamily, commercial and construction loans. They were also a warehouse lender.

Most of the company's 250 employees were expected to be retained. The bank reopened 2010-01-25 as Charter Bank, Albuquerque -- a newly-chartered federal savings bank and a subsidiary of Beal Financial Corporation, Plano, Texas.