Real estate market crash brings bank chairman back to his bill-collecting roots

For Salt Lake City native Edward Jamison, things have come full circle.

He started his banking career as a bill collector. Today, his Community Bank and its banking peers are concentrating on the same thing. They are trying to collect from borrowers who have been slammed by the real estate market crash.

Jamison, chairman and chief executive officer of Community Bancorp, enjoyed the last decade or so, building a billion-dollar financial institution as he helped business clients grow.

In December 2004, the bank holding company went public. The stock offering let longtime investors sell shares without waiting for a potential merger and it gave Community an attractive currency for buying other banks, publicly traded shares.

Since then, Jamison has learned to live in a corporate fishbowl.

Question: How did you become a banker?

Answer: I really wanted to get into advertising. I fell into a banking position by chance and enjoyed it and have been at it the last 35, 36 years.

Every banker has got to sell himself first. We have customers who have been with us for 18 years in two different banks.

Question: What was your first job?

Answer: I was a collector for past-due payments or collateral, repossessing cars or foreclosing on homes, for Murray First Thrift. Then, I moved into branch management. In 1984, I went to work for First Security Corp., which was the largest banking company in Utah and Idaho. I was in charge of one of their subsidiaries, a real estate-oriented lending company.

We collapsed it into First Security, the bank, and that's when I decided I would come down to Las Vegas and start a bank.

Noel Bennett, a friend of mine who had left Zions Bancorporation, and I came down and investigated the Las Vegas market. It was strong, robust, growing. When I started Nevada Community Bank in 1990, that was the first new bank in 10 years in Southern Nevada.

First Security called and said would you be interested in selling, and I said no. I kept saying "no" until the price got to where I said "yes" (in 1994). It was about $70 million (in assets).

I opened (Community Bank) in 1995.

Question: Why did you decide to offer Community Bancorp shares publicly?

Answer: Going public was No. 1 to provide liquidity for our shareholders. If you want to sell, here's the tool. It also provided us with a currency in the form of stock to go out and buy other institutions. We bought Bank of Commerce in Las Vegas. We bought Valley Bank. And we bought Cactus Commerce in Arizona.

Question: Who are your typical customers?

Answer: Small- to medium-size businesses. Developers, home builders, professionals -- doctors, lawyers, dentists.

Question: What's happening with your small-business clients since the economic downturn in Southern Nevada?

Answer: Our small-business core is still fundamentally sound. The majority of concern is from the spillover from the residential market. We may have a financial relationship with someone who builds residential block walls or they pour the slab or they provide the lumber. As the housing market has slowed down, of course, their business has slowed down.

The office market has softened. If you're a mortgage company doing residential loans and you have no mortgages, you go out of business (and no longer need an office). If you are a title company and the market starts to slow down, you don't need that same office space.

Question: Do you think Arizona and Southern Nevada are going to come out of the slump faster than other areas of the country?

Answer: Yes. We truly believe that because of a stronger employment base and in-migration. We still have to have people moving here for those jobs. So, as we see that, it's going to heal our real estate problems a lot quicker.

In Las Vegas, we only have limited land. So eventually it will fill up because there's only so much supply.

Jobs will bring us out of this a lot quicker than other (areas).

We believe that we'll see some progressive indicators toward the end of this year, but it really is going to be '09 before we see material change.

Question: Is this a good time for investors to buy bank stocks?

Answer: Institutional investors believe that the market has pushed the prices below value. Some are going to have maybe more problems than others, but fundamentally they are strong banks and their stock will rebound. The question is when.

Question: What would be the most encouraging and discouraging things that you could see in the economy?

Answer: If we had some kind of event that would discourage tourism, (that would be bad).

On the positive side, we would like to see employment grow, jobless numbers decline and the inventory of residential property (coming down), that's going to be encouraging. Then, people are going to say we need to build homes again. We understand that (home builders' inventory) is pretty thin.

Contact reporter John G. Edwards at jedwards@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0420.