One Thrift Passes, One Thrift Pursues Northwest Market

Jonesboro thrift First Community Bank opened a full-service branch in April in the Tulsa suburb of Broken Arrow, Okla. The firm skipped right over Northwest Arkansas, where every other banker in the state seems to be magnetically drawn.

“We have looked at some opportunities in Northwest Arkansas,” said Dwayne Powell, CEO of First Community Bank and of Pocahontas Bancorp, which owns it. “We just didn’t find anything that we thought was the right opportunity.”

Instead, First Community decided to build on the mortgage company, Southern Mortgage Corp., it bought in Broken Arrow in October 2001. It bought an existing bank branch building but no deposits or assets.

“We’re starting from scratch,” Powell said.

Brent Holtzauer, a First Community loan officer, has transferred to Broken Arrow to manage the new branch, as has a customer service rep. Four more employees were hired locally.

FCB had $731 million in assets as of Dec. 31, down from $744 million a year earlier.

Priority Bank, an Ozark-based thrift with $35.3 million in assets, recently told the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal it has plans to build two to three branches in the Fayetteville/Springdale market in the near future.

Priority has already received approval to accept deposits from the Office of Thrift Supervision, and it has approval for a lending office in Sapulpa, Okla.

Powell hasn’t written off Northwest Arkansas completely, but right now he’s concentrating on northeast Arkansas — with new branches this year in Paragould and Jonesboro — and Tulsa.

“We’re looking for additional sites out there right now, in Broken Arrow specifically and in the Tulsa area as a whole,” he said. “The market is fabulous out there. It’s a growing market, it’s vibrant and it’s a very large market.”

And competitive, he said. “But we find that it’s no more competitive than northeast Arkansas or anywhere else we would find to branch.”