Sabal Financial Inks Another Loan Deal

Sabal Financial Group L.P. in Newport Beach, Calif., has purchased $142.2 million of loans from Bank of the Cascades in Bend, Ore.

Sabal said Monday that the package consists of 171 performing and nonperforming loans, primarily secured by retail, office and industrial properties and land-based assets in Oregon and Idaho.

For the $1.6 billion-asset Cascade, which has suffered steep losses on real estate loans in recent years, the deal would substantially reduce its level of problem assets. At June 30, roughly $98 million of the company's assets were not performing, compared to $120 million at the same in 2010.

The acquisition would be the second in recent weeks for Sabal, which specializes in buying portfolios of real estate loans and has $3 billion of assets under management. In mid-October the company announced that it had acquired a $153 million loan portfolio from an unnamed retail bank in the Midwest.

"We have participated in a number of deals similar to this one recently and we continue to see an influx of them on the horizon," R. Patterson Jackson, chief executive of Sabal Financial, said in a press release. "There is a strong desire among banks to clear out assets that are weighing them down."

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