Wednesday, September 06, 2006
HomeTown Bank to open 2 branch locations
The branches, on Colonial Avenue and Franklin Road, should be open in 2007.
The latest from The Ticker blog
HomeTown Bank, which opened its first location in downtown Roanoke in December, unveiled plans for its third and fourth branch offices.
William Clark, president and chief executive officer, said the local chain will open one branch in early 2007, using a building at the northwest corner of Electric Road and Colonial Avenue.
That office will be a temporary location, where HomeTown Bank has acquired a total of four buildings.
By late 2007, Clark said, two of those structures will be razed to make way for what he described as a newly constructed, two-story bank.
HomeTown's fourth branch will be at 3515 Franklin Road near Kmart and across the street from Berglund Sport Utility Super Center. That facility, scheduled to open in spring 2007, will occupy space leased in the former location of Movie Gallery.
Clark said HomeTown's expansion is being fueled by solid loan demand, about 80 percent of it from business borrowers. Most of the remaining 20 percent of HomeTown loans are to consumers, largely for mortgages or home refinancing.
HomeTown's assets now total $64 million, Clark said, up from $25 million when the bank's downtown location opened. The chain's second branch opened last spring in the Smith Mountain Lake area.
The two latest additions come at a time when Wall Street and some economists are expressing concerns about the possibility of a recession, coming in part from the recent slowdown in residential real estate sales.
"I don't see a doomsday scenario," Clark said, although, he added, "real estate is slowing."
Clark said the planned branch at Electric and Colonial is a substitute for the Southwest Roanoke County location he had previously forecast as HomeTown's first expansion, originally slated to be in West Village, currently under construction nearby.
Construction at West Village ran into delays that prevented it "from meeting our schedule," Clark said.
Both new locations will offer the 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. weekday hours featured at the first two HomeTown Banks.
Part of Clark's targeted clientele at the Colonial Avenue-Electric Road intersection: the parents of students at the private North Cross School, just across Colonial.
