In OptimumBank. I'm going to do this in English, if that's okay with everybody. How many people in the room are familiar with my bank? Shareholders? No. Yale's a shareholder. God bless him. I'm wearing today my OptimumBank 25-year anniversary shirt. Very proud of it. Our bank was started about 25 years ago. It was originally going to be an internet bank. I came in as an investor after 2007, 2008, the market crashed, and certainly South Florida, epicenter was probably Fort Myers, and the bank got killed. I came in to be the, I guess, the white knight. Now, I'm in the bank 16 years later, and today we're one of the top-performing banks in the country. Certainly in our under $3 billion category.
Recently we've been awarded. Raymond James gave us number 19 as best banks, and S&P gave us an award. People seem to like us. Our stock hit a 52-week high, actually, today. Hopefully, that continues. This is our leadership team. I've been around since, like I said, I think I got anointed as chairman of the board sometime August of 2010, and that was after I raised the money for the bank to recapitalize the bank, and I decided or I was tasked with looking after the investment from everybody. I started going to visit the bank a week, a month, and now 16 years later, of course, now I live in Florida and I took over the CEO role in May, and now I'm just living the dream. Braden Smith, the president. Elliot Nunez, CFO. This is our timeline.
Our timeline, again, bank started as an internet bank. It was originally optimumbank.com in 2000. As you see, we just got to the billion-dollar mark really at 1231, and now we're about $1.3 billion, and we're going to issue, God willing, second quarter earnings in July. That'll be really, really good, God willing. This is our story. This was our first quarter deck. We're for a smaller bank. We recognize the responsibility for investor relations and the corporate governance, and so we're out there meeting with-- We have analyst coverage, and we're out there talking to investors all the time, and I think it's very important. I have an open-door policy. I'm the one CEO you're going to meet here where my cell phone number is on my business card.
You can call me, WhatsApp me, send me smoke signals in the middle of the night. I'm glad to answer. This is as of first quarter. We have normal earnings calls. Seth over here, sitting in the front row, is in charge of IR. Please feel free to join our mailing list and all the stuff that we do to tell people what's going on. Again, we got almost to $1.3 billion at the end of the first quarter. Things are doing really, really strong. Over $1 billion in our loan portfolio, and of course, to fund that, we have deposits. Our common shares have remained relatively flat. We do have an active ATM, though we're not really-- I refuse to sell stock below book. Our stock is really trading right around book.
Today, because it's at a high, we're about 105 or 110 of book. Typically, we've been trading below book. There's a little bit of a, when you go online and take a look, if you don't spend enough effort, if you look only at Yahoo Finance or something like that, we have two classes of stock. We have basically a non-voting common. The reason for that was because when the bank needed more capital and I was willing to put it in, they wouldn't let me go over 9.9, the regulators. We ended up buying stock to support the company, but it has no special rights. It's literally less rights. I have non-voting shares. For some reason, the way the market places it, since it's not traded, it doesn't fit into the market cap. The EPS has got to be divided basically in half.
The earnings per share, really, I think actually we're on target this year. I think I announced like $0.84 as being the number, we expect to beat that. The EPS number is wrong and our market cap is really wrong because the real investors that are investing, they know to do the math to add back those shares to figure out what the share price is versus the amount of total shares out there. I would suggest people take a look at that. We have three locations. We're basically in South Florida. I tell people our community really is South Florida. Really, it's like five counties. Our other community is the Jewish world. We're known nationwide as lending to synagogues.
We also have a network to be able to research and know who our customers are, so the deals that we're doing, this is why we haven't had a bad loan in eight years. Our loan portfolio is strong. We're able to vet who our customers are, and that's how business goes. Our profitability is great. Our return on average equity was 15%, and that's non-core. Core, which is basically adding back allowance because our allowance, since we haven't had a bad loan, every time we book a loan, we have to still take one and a quarter percent, basically, and we take it as an expense in the month where it's done, which is a problem with banking overall when you want to look at financials. I happen to be a CPA. It's a problem with GAAP accounting.
Regardless, our core average equity is a 22.5% return. That means if you invested a dollar today, or really the bank with their equity that they're investing today is really earning 22.5% on the money. We don't have a dividend, so you don't see it in cash flow. If you were to hold it, and in theory, let it grow, we're growing to the tune of doubling every four or five years, based on what we're doing. These are just highlights. I would suggest people look at this afterwards to really digest it. We killed quarter-over-quarter, year-over-year, almost in every metric. Assets increasing, net earnings. Everything is better quarter-over-quarter, year-over-year. I think we're most proud of the NIM. For you guys that invest in banks understand banking.
Really our cost of goods, if we were a manufacturer, is basically the gross profit is the NIM. You start with your cost of interest, or what you're earning in interest is top-line gross revenue, and what you're paying in interest expense would be your COGS if this was manufacturing. Your NIM is really your gross profit. The fact that we're at a 449, which basically the metric in the banking world to be good is, like, 3.5, and we're a point higher than that. I'm really proud of it. Really, if I was sitting and talking to any of you guys directly, which I guess I am, but just I'm standing and you're sitting.
The thing is, I would tell you that our business really stems from, even though we're publicly traded and we're growing at the clip that we're growing, we're really a family. All of our customers, all of our depositors, everybody that's part of us, even our investors, obviously, are part of our family. Even if it's a local drive, I had to fly here to see you. That being said, this is what we're doing, and we're doing it at a really strong growth rate, at strong results, and we really don't fit your typical banking, at what your peer set is. The reason for that is really because of the relationships we have with all the people. Oh, that's better, I guess. All right. It's the relationships we have with everybody in our world that makes things go around.
This just talks about Florida. We have majority of our business is really Florida, the majority of the Florida business is South Florida. As most of you know, Florida is probably beating most of the country as far as how great of a place it is, with the results, unemployment rate being lower than the national average. Population is growing. Thank God for the mayor of New York, because plenty of the New Yorkers are moving down, coming with that is a lot of business, which is great. The stuff that we're seeing, the loan demand that we're getting, which literally on every day of the week, right now we have, like, $500 million in our pipeline. It's all vanilla deals. We're able to get from our clients, SOFR + 350, SOFR + 400. I assume some of you are borrowers somewhere.
SOFR + 350 is probably a little higher of the range, the reality is what they get out of it is they get me in the middle of the night when they have an issue. They get the other 120 members of our staff to be able to help them when they need something. As their business grows or life changes or they need something for their kids or whatever they may need, we're there for them any time of day to be able to take care of them. That's something that regular banks usually can't offer. Even a community bank, when they close at 5:00 P.M., you're done. I'll be in the office tomorrow morning, 9:00 A.M., I'll take care of you. With us, our people are able to work remotely.
If you need something at 8:00 P.M., someone could go in there and do something for you at 8:00 P.M. It's not like you're sitting on hold. If you call Citibank and you need something. Imagine you need something that's out of the ordinary. That could take you forever to get something done over there. Believe me, I've lived through it myself, having one company of mine that uses Citibank for whatever reason, and they needed me to sign a signature card. It took me 1 hour and 45 minutes before I just said, "You know what? Leave me off the signature card. I'm leaving." That's on Oakland Park and US 1. Here's our business. You can see all the trends of the graphs over here. Employee count's gone up. Total assets have gone up.
The NIM, like I said, super proud of that 449. Our net income, core pre-tax, $28 million annualize the first quarter. I could tell you right now we're going to beat that number. This is our growth. If you take a look at our lending, 29%, almost, growth rate over the last five years. For the most part, deposits, same thing. That makes sense. We're in places where our depositors are, again, a part of the family. As soon as we want to take more deposits, or if we really need something and we don't have it, we could just raise our CD rates by, like, 0.5%, 0.05%, 1 BPS. Literally, I sit there at the branches because I go walk around, I'm schmoozing with everybody.
When we raise our CD rate by 0.10%, there's a line out the door and I'm pouring coffee for all the people saying, "Hey, thanks for coming in. What do you need?" Literally, it's that easy. We could raise $3 million a day in CDs if I wanted to sell CDs. That's how our business goes. Non-interest income, again, 32% growth rate on non-interest income. Very, very proud of it. Yield of loans, and this is really what it is the yield of loans at 7%. Our cost of money, this is the cost of interest-bearing money, but we also have a third of our deposits are non-interest-bearing. You put it together, our real cost of money is about 2.6%, 2.5%, and that would explain the yield versus that equals the NIM, and that's our simple business model. Core deposit franchise, like we talk about.
We just opened that North Miami Beach branch less than two years ago. It was right around Hanukkah, December of 2024, and within two years, we're over $50 million in that branch. I think break even in a branch in the world, most people that know bank is probably at $30 million, depending on the cost of your labor, maybe $35 million with rent. We're already killing it over there, and we're really part of that community. That community, North Miami Beach, is a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, Jewish and Haitian neighborhood, and we're known. People come in just to say hello. I office there. I try to office there on Mondays, and people just come into the branch just to say hi to me, which it's an odd thing, but it is what it is. Capital trends. This is our loan losses. We're below everybody.
We don't have any real losses. The only losses you see if you take a look at our financials, again, another issue with GAAP accounting, which I'm a CPA, I'm a fan of GAAP accounting, by the way, just for the record. That being said, we were doing a portfolio of LendingClub, that kind of stuff. That's consumer lending. You know when you do the consumer lending that you're going to have a certain loss percentage for that kind of product. When we priced it out, we were looking for a bogey of 9% yield. The LendingClub portion, we configured a portfolio to give us a 12 or 13. On that 13, 4% expected loss. We net out nine. The thing is, I would look at that as a net and then do top line, the net number as my top line.
Under GAAP, you have to take that as a credit loss. Our true credit loss is really zero. The credit loss in this case is that 4% from that consumer lending. If you look at our Qs, I think it's in the Qs, and probably in the K as well, you'd be able to see that. Comparatively to our peers, we're way below. If you really backed out that number and looked at it the right way, we're really way below. Non-performing assets. Again, we barely have anything in non-performing. Non-performing for here is we have one loan that was an accounts receivable loan, and we expect to get paid in full, but because we had to classify it a certain way, it sits on our books. We should be perfectly fine on that deal. Charge-offs, you could see we're literally zero.
Nothing to talk about. I don't even remember what was in 2023, that's still a very low number comparatively. Our leverage ratio is good. Our business is good. Again, we have an active ATM if we really wanted to sell stock. I personally don't feel it's fair to any of my shareholders to sell below book. I know that in true value if we were going to sell, our company's probably, we'd be selling at a two times book or higher. It doesn't make sense for us to sell below book and dilute ourselves. We just keep doing what we're doing. This is just our loan detail. We're a CRE lender. That's what South Florida is, at least how I know it to be. Seth's lived there his whole life, maybe he would disagree partially, I don't know.
Again, the consumer number, you see it dwindling down. Actually, no, that actually includes HELOCs. What I talked about before was just regular consumer. This is our commercial. That's what we are, commercial real estate. Multifamily is really commercial as well, it just gets segregated for this report. We have a nice clean business running around 400% for our concentration levels. Before I continue, any questions from anybody? Yes, sir. That's mainly labor. That's labor and all the software expenses and property, that's our whole business in a nutshell. Everything runs off of that $7 million number. I could tell you, I think that number's a little high. When we built it, we built it to be able to be That was when they started with this Fidesha business that now got pushed off.
We built out our business to be able to handle a $3 billion-$5 billion growth. We have enough staff that we don't have to add anybody. Which is on the other side, we're a little overstaffed because we're not there yet. Once we get there, the numbers are going to get better, but that's the answer to your question. Sure. A what now? Yeah. Yes. Again, our whole business is really relationship-driven. We really know most of our clients, like first name. Literally, we see people in the hallway, "How are you? Good to see you." Not to bring religion into it, the Jewish religion believes that God created people as good people, as a general rule, okay? As good people, it's very hard for someone to intentionally screw over somebody that did something for them.
My business belief has been since I started my career, at this point, 30 years ago, or a little bit more than 30 years ago, is that if you go to the client, whatever business you're in, and you have a relationship with them and they know that you did for them, it's a win-win situation, but you did for them, it's going to be very hard for them to want to screw you over. Just that a bigger bank, you don't ever meet the guy who's lending you the money. You have a lender, but you don't have. It's okay to screw over that I'm not saying it's okay. It's not okay. It's easier for somebody mentally, because the way we're programmed as human beings not to hurt somebody.
In my case, we know our customer, our customer knows who we are, and therefore, I could tell you how many times somebody comes to me and say to me, "You know, Moishe, if something goes really wrong in our business, I'll screw over every bank, but you're the one guy I'm going to pay." I love hearing that. I don't like hearing it as a general thought, but it makes me feel good inside. The reality is we have such a strong following that we don't have. If somebody has a problem, they're calling us and say, "Help me through it." We have that now. We have a guy with a mobile home park that didn't work out. He still had 60% LTV, by the way, on the deal.
He's like, "I got to figure something out." I have Seth working, who's a mobile home investor, to figure out to buy the note from the bank or make a deal with the guy. The reality is we're more than just a transaction with our customer. I'm not saying it to really say I'm great or whatever, because I'm not, but this is something to teach in college to kids. You do it the right way. I always tell people it's because I went to college at a certain time where I learned relationship marketing, charismatic management, vertical integration, and computers that took me into a business like this, where I said, "Okay, who's our customer base? How do we sell them more products? How do we get them into our door to do more stuff with us?" Right?
That's the vertical integration sort of thing. How do we get the employees to want to work every day hard for us? That's the charismatic management approach. You go, almost always, maybe not always with him, but almost always it's a friendly interaction with everybody. The point is this is how we're running a business. It's really relationship driven, employees as well as customers. Any other questions? Yes, sir. It is definitely not office tower, okay? In fact, even our hotels that we have, which is about $150 million of our portfolio, are literally $5 million Marriott Courtyards along 95 from Key West to. We're mainly strip malls. If you think South Florida, you drive around. Go to the Hard Rock Casino in Hollywood. We're the lender on all the strip malls across the street, the parking garage down the block.
You look at the Jewish neighborhood along Sterling, we're strip malls of all these. You're talking about our average loan size is $5 million bucks. Maybe we're now getting near $5.5 million. My lending limit is $45 million. Even when I do a loan now, I do a loan now at a $30 million loan, that skews the number. Reality is, majority of my loans that are outstanding, by the way, our average LTV in our portfolio is only 52%. Okay. We're not a high leverage lender. We joke about it because I'm the chairman of every loan committee. Every single loan that we're approving, I'm like, "This is a loan I would buy for my debt amount every day of the week." You know what I mean?
We did something different when I got involved with the bank, which makes us really different than most banks, was that we made the whole board non-bankers. Everybody that's on our board of our bank are business people, real estate business people, accountants, lawyers, which I say almost in jest because lawyers maybe are not business people. That being said, we figured that there's a checks and balances in the room. You have the bankers that sit there that present the data, you got the business people in the room that say, "Hold on, what the hell are you talking about? That doesn't make any sense." We argue out all the points that the conclusion is a better conclusion because we have differing opinions. We're not just a bunch of thinking the same way and everyone's just, "Yeah, that's a great idea.
That's a great idea." At the end of the day, it's all a bad idea, but all 10 people just agreed that's a great idea because they think the same way. That's another thing that made us different as a bank. I hope I answered your question. The last question, you got something? Easily. You must be a data guy. I appreciate the question. I don't have an exact answer for you. I could tell you that we are well known in the Florida market, definitely the South Florida market, in the Jewish world, we're known nationwide. Right now, I know that we could get more into Hollywood, as an example. We have board members from Hollywood. We've lent money in Hollywood, but we're not big in Hollywood.
There are a lot of doctors, a lot of doctors' offices that are owner-occupied doctors' offices, and to get in with them is a little harder. I would love to talk to you afterwards because it's a really good question, and really, I could give you a bunch of data. I don't know if I could give you an actual conclusion to that data to tell you that this is where we are. I could tell you that we're actively working full time. We go to all these events. This guy is on the road going to, you name it, golf courses to do charity events or CRA stuff. We just did something with Habitat for Humanity. We're busy. We're all over South Florida. Really, that's where we want to stay.
Unless we buy a bank in another place or we open up a loan office in another city or another state, really not another state, another state. We want to stay South Florida because you have to know your marketplace where you're doing business, especially when you're lending against real estate. We'll talk later. I'll give you my card and we'll talk. Any other questions? All right. I'm about out of time. Let me see if there's anything else to present. This is the investment opportunity right here. We're beating everybody in efficiency at 53%. Most banks are at 65%, which is an inverse math of figuring out how well you're doing financially versus your employees. I think we have more dollars and cents per employee than I think we average each employee is like $200,000 under management. No, it's got to be more than that by now.
We were beating most of our peers with all these things. This is a good sheet for everyone to look at. You look at our growth rates, and again, our stock is at a 52-week high today, and I hope you all become shareholders. That's my presentation. How's that? Thank you. Nice to see you. Bless it.
I didn't know about this MicroCap Conference until I read it on the website that OPHC was going to present, and I've been living in Las Vegas for a long time, and I've heard this going on for a long time. Happy to, guys listed it on your website there, the MicroCap Conference going on, and I decided to come here. I live in Henderson. It's very friendly.
Oh, thank you. Thanks. Thank you for being a shareholder.
Oh, yeah.
Thank you. All right, guys. If you stick around.