SAN DIEGO — Credit Union Journal asked attendees at the CUNA Operations, Sales and Service Council's annual conference here if they have seen signs of an economic recovery.
Dave Stenberg, COO, Park Side FCU, Kalispell, Mont.
Our trade area is our county, Flathead County in northwestern Montana. Unfortunately, our county leads the state in foreclosure rate and is No. 3 in unemployment, so our members are hurting.
We are doing a lot of loan modifications and rewrites. We are not expecting to see improvement in the housing market for a while. One of our SEGs is an aluminum plant, and it is closing forever. Also, the timber industry is hurting. There will not be a recovery any time soon in our area because so many jobs are being lost forever.
Janis Rowe, VP-Operations, United CU, Mexico, Mo.
I don't think the recession is over in our area. We are in the Midwest, so things got bad there after the rest of the country. I think the turnaround will come later, also.
Our charge offs are under 1%, so we're doing pretty good. We only have had to foreclose on four houses, and we've resold two of those.
Judy Kinney, VP-Retail Sales and Susan Tillery, VP-Lending, LGE Community CU, Marietta, Ga.
Our members are still cautious. Our charge offs have increased, but some of those are strategic defaults. Some of those defaulting have good credit, but don't know how to handle being behind.
Our local real estate market did not have an artificially inflated bubble, but we still have a declining market. We did not do business lending, so we haven't been hurt that bad by construction taking a hit.
Jennifer Lehn, EVP, Numerica CU, Spokane Valley, Wash.
We have not seen a recovery yet, but we hope we've seen the bottom. Loan demand is down because consumer confidence is low.
Chris Lamb, EVP/COO, E1 Financial CU, Monterey Park, Calif.
Consumer confidence is still down, and our members are not borrowing like they did in the past, for several reasons. People want to pay off debt. Other people have heard financials are not lending so they don't even try, or they've gone to a bank and the bank made it so difficult for them they assume it will be the same at a credit union. Stated income loans are being scrutinized a lot more than in the past, which makes it more difficult for many people to get loans. People are waiting for good news, they are waiting for signs things are picking up before fully participating. Our delinquencies and charge-offs are up. We are doing workout loans. We don't have a huge number of delinquent home loans, but on the consumer loan side people have gotten behind. We excuse a couple payments and let people start clean. The important thing is we have to be able to verify income stream to do a loan modification. So far, we've been pretty lucky; members are making their payments once we've helped them.
