Probably $25,000. Having said that, quite frankly, if someone walked through the door and applied for $10,000 to get a business off the ground, we'd take a look at it -- but it's not our stock in trade.
I'd say our average small-business loan is in the $150,000 area. We are, as far as I know, the only mutual savings bank with SBA preferred lender status, which allows you to evaluate a credit in-house, but you have to do the lending in some volume for that status. Last year, we did $29 million in SBA lending, and we've got a total of $143 million on the books.
The 40-basis-point servicing fee and the reduced guarantees might discourage other banks from being as strongly involved in SBA lending as we have been, so we might have more applications heading our way.
On the other hand, reducing guarantees might hurt secondary market sales, and that means you'll have to retain more capital, so the reductions seem counterproductive.
We're making small-business loans down to $1,000, and I've probably made them smaller than that. But having a small bank, $115 million in assets, and being in a community of 8,500 people, we make loans to individuals as small as $200, $300, $400 all the time.
Our average small-business loan is $25,000 to $50,000, but lately, a lot of this lending is aimed at helping keep afloat the businesses that depend on our lake.
It's a Corps of Engineers lake, and the water got so high during the flooding that it shut down marinas and boat dealers, so we're providing cash-flow funds to help them survive.
We have some SBA loans on the books, but we need them, so we don't sell any of them in the secondary market. That means were not worried about the new fees for selling the loans at a premium, but, if we ever got to the point where we needed to sell them, the fees might have an effect our SBA lending decisions.
We serve many small business with loans as small as $5,000 and $10,000. Over time, some of those businesses grow to have significant accounts, which significantly enhances lending yield. And there isn't much competition for small-business loans, so we get fair pricing.
Our average small-business loan is probably in the $200,000 area. We are doing SBA lending and, while we don't have as large a portfolio as we'd like to have, it is a lucrative area of business for us.
Small-business loan demand is not very strong but, this year, we expect to book $5 million in SBA loans. Additionally, our new small-business borrowings should exceed $50 million -- and we're expecting $50 million to $100 million in renewals.
I don't think the new SBA fees or reduced guarantees will be deal breakers, because we apply the same guidelines we have for nonguaranteed loans, and we are maintaining them in our portfolio.
