At Raymond James. Joining me tonight today is United Bankshares CEO Rick Adams, CFO Mark Tatterson. Both will be presenting. Also here with us from United is COO Ross Draber and Senior Vice President of Treasury Wes Tracewell. So thank you very much for joining us here today. And Rick, I'll hand it over to you.
Thank you, Steve. I was going to do the introductions, but you did that. You want to keep going? You're doing honorably. You can just give my speech for me. Well, appreciate that. Appreciate the opportunity to be here. Thanks to Raymond James for inviting us to this conference. It's always a good conference, and we look forward to our meetings today. My name is Rick Adams, the CEO of UBSI. And for those of you who are not familiar with the story, I thought that I would kick things off and talk about a little history, a little background of the company, make some comments about 2024, some comments about 2025. And I'm going to turn it over to our CFO, Mark Tatterson, who's going to go through a brief slide deck with you.
But for those of you that aren't familiar with the story, the first thing I tell you is that we've been around for a long time, since 1839. And I like to say that our long history says a lot about who we are and about the way that we do business. And a second thing that I think says a lot about who we are and about the way that we do business is our dividend streak. And we have not only paid a dividend, but increased our dividend to shareholders for 51 consecutive years. And that makes us a Dividend King. And a Dividend King is a company that has consistently increased its dividend for 50 or more consecutive years. And of the thousands of publicly traded companies that are out there, there are less than 60 Dividend Kings.
I don't think there's anything that really captures the essence of our company quite like that dividend streak. And I think it really speaks to our discipline and our consistency and our conservatism. And to have a streak like that, you know, on one hand, you've got to be a company that can always protect against downside risk. But on the other hand, you've got to be a company that over a long period of time can grow and innovate. And so we've been able to do both of those things. And the dividend is very important to us. We're very much committed to it. And when I think about our history, I think about it really in three phases or three chapters. And the first one would be building what I'll call the legacy bank.
And for most of our 185 years, we were just a one-office bank in Parkersburg, West Virginia, a good little bank that stood the test of time. But in the mid-1980s, when the banking laws changed, we started doing a lot of M&A. And we built a really nice franchise, ultimately totally about 75 offices throughout West Virginia and into some border areas in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, right on the edge of West Virginia. And that bank really has become the dominant franchise in West Virginia. We're West Virginia's oldest company, West Virginia's largest publicly traded company, with the number one market share in West Virginia, a very profitable bank. But it was mostly that legacy franchise was mostly a rural franchise. And by rural, I don't mean in depressed areas, but in areas that really were maybe a little slower growth than others.
Rural franchises sometimes get a bad rap. It's a pretty good place to grow up as a bank because the economy is pretty stable. It's a great place to build a core deposit franchise. You know, those deposits are a little less expensive. They're a little more sticky. It's a very efficient place to do business. You think about where you're going to house your operations center, you know, a large building with hundreds of people. There's no place that you can do it any more efficiently than in West Virginia. It was a great place to grow up as a bank. What it lacked was the outlet for growth that we were going to need to survive as a publicly traded company over a long period of time. That really took us to chapter two of that history.
And that's what I'll call building the D.C. franchise. So back in 1990, we asked ourselves where we could go that would give us that outlet for growth in the Mid-Atlantic. We picked the Washington D.C. area. So in 1990, we bought a small bank in McLean, Virginia. It's a wealthy suburb outside of D.C.. And then over the next 25 years or so, through a dual strategy of organic growth and M&A, we built what I think has become the best bank in D.C., about 56 locations now in the MSA. We bank the best names in town. We're involved in the best projects. And we truly have become the community bank of the nation's capital. And that experience has been a wonderful one for us. It was a big deal for us because eventually that D.C. franchise became larger than our legacy franchise.
But the two of them went really well together. But in about 2017, when we did our last acquisition in the D.C. area, we decided to turn our focus for growth outside of the D.C. area. And this really takes us to the current chapter, what I'll call chapter three. And that is building the southern franchise. And we decided that we had the scale that we needed in D.C. to compete organically going forward. So we wanted to look outside of D.C., get access to some new growth markets, get some additional geographic diversification, and get some diversification in terms of the types of industries that we were lending to. And we decided to head south. And one thing that was interesting to us was to try to build a franchise down the 81 corridor.
And if you're familiar, it's the highway that kind of runs through some of the major cities in the south. And several years ago, Businessw eek did an article about I-81. They called it the Boom Belt. And so we were interested in that Boom Belt. It kind of starts in Richmond, and it goes down through the Research Triangle, through Charlotte, through the upstate of South Carolina, into Atlanta, and then on into Alabama. And if you fast forward, what you'll see is that we've been able to do that. Several years later, we've got dots on a map in Richmond, in Raleigh, in Durham, in Charlotte, in Greenville, Greer, and now with our recent acquisition on into Atlanta. And this has given us access to some new areas. It's taken us into southern Virginia. It's taken us into North Carolina, South Carolina, and now Georgia.
So it's given us that geographic diversification that we were looking for. Also, if you know much about 81, there are a variety of different industries that we can lend to along the corridor. And there are also some great growth markets. So we've been very pleased with the franchise that we built. And the other thing when we thought about going to the south that was interesting to us, in addition to building a franchise along the 81 corridor, was to build a franchise on the coast because that's the other area that's really driving the growth in the Carolinas. And we've been able to do that. And again, you look at dots on a map, you go all the way up to the Outer Banks, starting at the Outer Banks and heading south. Wilmington has been a great market for us.
Brunswick County, it's the fastest growing county in North Carolina, down to Myrtle Beach, one of the fastest growing MSAs in the whole country. And then all the way down into Charleston, South Carolina, which is absolutely on fire. And I don't think there's anybody that's got a better franchise right now than we do on the coast of the Carolinas. And so those two were intentional. Maybe a little unintentional was a bit of a franchise that we picked up in what I would call eastern North Carolina. This really isn't the growth market, the area that we were looking for. It's more like our legacy franchise, quite honestly. But we'll take all of that that we can get. And a lot of people think about West Virginia as being the place in our franchise that has the lowest cost of funds. But it's actually North Carolina now.
And it's largely because of some of these rural North Carolina areas. So we put together a substantial franchise in the Carolinas. And just like it was a big deal for us when the D.C. franchise became bigger than that legacy franchise, our franchise in the southeast now has surpassed D.C.. And it's now the biggest piece of the company. We're very excited about it. We got more offices in the south than anywhere else, more loans. We've had more growth, more production. Some of our largest relationships are now in the south. We've been voted the best bank in South Carolina for two years in a row. And our focus from an M&A perspective is to continue to build here. So the final chapter is still being written. But we're very excited about what we've put together in the southeast.
But that's kind of how, if you don't know the story, how I would look at our company. Next, I'd like to make a couple of comments about 2024. Obviously, 2024 is in the rearview mirror. I don't want to spend a lot of time on it. Mark's going to talk a little bit about it here in a minute. But just let me say to those of you that are out there that 2024 was a great year. We had great financial results. We had nice earnings per share growth. We beat consensus estimates. And we grew earnings in a year when, quite honestly, overall, the industry was down. We had a nice year growing loans and deposits. We grew loans and deposits in all four quarters of 2024. We've now grown loans for 13 straight quarters, deposits for seven.
You're never going to see us being the biggest, fastest loan grower in the country. But what we look for is just that nice, steady growth. And we've had a lot of success doing that. I would highlight the margin as another area of success. A lot of people struggled with the margin in 2024. But our margin stabilized probably sooner than others. Kind of back in mid-2023, it stabilized right about 350, which is a nice high margin. And it stayed ever since then within five or six basis points. So it's been stabilized sooner. It's remained higher. And it's been in a really tight range. And we think that that's going to be consistent going forward, really, regardless of what rates do. Our profitability metrics were strong. Our asset quality metrics were strong. Liquidity capital all strong. And we did a great job managing expenses.
But enough about '24. It's ancient history. So let me tell you a few things that we're focused on for 2025. The first one I would mention is Atlanta. I mentioned earlier we just closed an acquisition in Atlanta. So that deal is closed. The conversion is going to be later this month. And a lot of times when you close and convert, people think, "Well, that's over. On to the next." Now, we are ready, willing, and able to do another deal if one presented itself. But we're going to make sure, first and foremost, that we don't take our eye off the ball with our Atlanta franchise. We've got a long history of successful integration.
So we're going to make sure that we really take care of the customers, really take care of those employees, get that on stable footing so that we can take advantage of the growth opportunities that we see in front of us in Atlanta. But that's one area of focus. A second one would be capital deployment. If you look at our capital levels, they're pretty high. And historically, we've always been pretty strong from a capital perspective. And over the last few years, we've intentionally built capital. Capital has been king for us. There's been a lot of economic uncertainty. We've had the SVB drama. And then, of course, knowing that we wanted to be active in M&A, we felt that it was best to be intentional about building capital. But considering our current capital levels, considering the current environment, we are very much focused on deploying that capital.
I think loan growth and M&A will continue to be a priority. The buyback, I'd also mentioned, we haven't been in the buyback since 2022, but where our stock is currently trading, especially this week, it may become a real priority very soon, and speaking of the stock trading down, another priority I would mention would be DOGE. DOGE has been in the news lately. It's put a lot of pressure on banks that have an exposure in D.C., like UBSI does. I think there are a lot of people that are out there, what I would say, trading on the headlines, which I understand. We've certainly been paying a lot of attention to this issue. I live in D.C. I can tell you, you know this. It certainly is the talk of the town in D.C. right now.
There are a couple of things I'd like to say about DOGE, and the first one would be, despite all the, what I'll call the Chicken Littles out there, the sky is not falling in Washington, D.C. right now, and unfortunately, I think this issue has been highly politicized. I think maybe some people are exaggerating the negative consequences of DOGE, and I think it's important to look behind the headlines and to try to gain and maintain some perspective. I think perspective is really important when you have an issue like this, and to try to understand what's really going on, and certainly, there are some things to be concerned about. Don't get me wrong, but based on what we're seeing, based on what we're hearing in the market by those that are very close to the issue, we do think that the DOGE concerns are a bit overblown.
The second thing I'd say about it, and this is perhaps more important than the first, is that even if the worst fears do materialize, United is well positioned to weather the storm. And if you look at the types of exposures that we have in D.C., the amounts of exposure, where that exposure is located, and how those exposures were underwritten, I think that those factors really mute the concerns of any significant downturn for United in D.C.. But of course, this thing changes every single day. It's fluid, and we're watching it very closely. But it would be a priority area of focus for us in 2025. And the final one that I'll mention is M&A. And we do consider M&A to be a line of business. We've done a lot of it, 34 acquisitions.
Even though we announced a deal a year ago when the environment was much different, I'd say it's very different today. The environment's much more conducive to getting deals done. I think you're going to see more deals. I think you're going to see larger deals. I think you're going to see approval times for deals get quicker. I think you're seeing that already, really. While we don't feel like we have to do a deal, we have put this other one to bed, and we are ready, willing, and able to do one if we find the right opportunity. Our focus does continue to be on building and growth markets in the southeast. Let me close by saying that we are well- positioned for success in 2025. We've got a fortress balance sheet. We've got a valuable and stable core deposit franchise.
We've got strong opportunities for growth, organic growth in the markets that we're in, loan growth, deposit growth, wealth management. And we've got one of the, I think, the most well-defined M&A strategies out there. We're an experienced, improved acquirer. And I think all of these things go together and will help drive our success in 2025. So now I'm going to turn it over to our CFO, Mark Tatterson. He's going to walk you through a slide presentation. We'd be glad to answer any questions that you all might have when we're finished.
Okay, great. Thank you, Rick. And thank you, Raymond James and Steve, for the continued coverage. We really appreciate it. And I will skip through the first couple of slides on here. I think Rick did a fantastic job of covering our background and some of our highlights from 2024.
We'll just start on our margin slide. Wanted to touch on this for a second. You can see our margin here. We reported the most recent quarter, 3.49% in Q4. As Rick mentioned, we've held in a very steady range over the last four quarters, ranging from 3.44%- 3.55%. So it has been very stable in the margin. We are forecasting it to continue to be very stable as we look out into 2025. This slide shows a summary of our current loan mix and our recent balance trends. In the most recent quarter, we were up about $49 million in loans. For the year, up about $300 million. I did want to point out that we are continuing to have tremendous success in the Carolinas, where our loan balances in 2024 were up 12.5%.
And also in our newer markets in Richmond and Lynchburg, we were also up about 11% in those markets. So really seeing strong growth out of the southeast markets. And we are excited about the opportunities that we're going to have in the state of Georgia with the Piedmont acquisition. So this is a new slide that we've added to our slide deck that summarizes our loan portfolio by major asset class and by geography. And as Rick discussed in the beginning, what we define as our southeast markets now represent the largest portion of our loan portfolio at 41%, followed by our Metro D.C. Baltimore market at 37%, and our legacy West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Shenandoah Valley markets at 19%. I would note that this slide is pro forma, including the Piedmont balances for 12/31.
So the graphic on the right side of this page shows a map, and the shaded areas represent where we have loans outstanding. And given the recent focus on D.C. and DOGE, we did provide some additional details, which are included on the bullet points on this slide that we thought might be helpful. Wanted to walk through those really quickly. So first, related to our office portfolio. So office now represents only about 4.2% of our total loans for United, and about 60% of that book is in the Washington, D.C. MSA. And a very key point here is that we have zero exposure to the Central Business District in terms of office loans. So you think of the large government-related buildings in the downtown area, we have no exposure to that. We have built up our office reserves over the last several quarters.
They now stand at $39 million, representing about 4.1% of the office book. Second point I would make here is that our outstandings to government contract lending is very limited and represents less than 1% of loans, really about 70 basis points of our total loans, so most of the loans that we have in the government contracting space are concentrated in blue-chip companies with our top four borrowers accounting for more than 85% of the outstandings, and I would note that those four borrowers all have a credit rating of BB+ or better, and finally, just a couple of points we'd make on the residential mortgage exposure, so our residential mortgage portfolio is very high FICO, with a weighted average of 760 overall on the FICO, and if you drill down specifically into the Washington, D.C. MSA, our FICO in the D.C. MSA weighted average is 765.
Would also note that the D.C. MSA does continue to be plagued by an overall lack of single-family housing inventory supply. So overall, while D.C., as Rick pointed out, is facing some potential challenges, we do have a very diverse portfolio, both geographically and by loan segments. And as everyone knows, we have strong underwriting, continuous ongoing monitoring of our portfolio. I want to touch on credit quality for just a minute. This shows our credit quality at year-end. You can see our NPAs were solid at only 25 basis points of total assets. And our net charge-offs for the year were very low at 10 basis points. And our allowance at $272 million stands at 1.25% of loans. If you look at the ACL, which includes the unfunded commitments reserve, it's at $307 million or 1.42%.
The next two slides show our asset quality going back to 2007, which would capture the Great Financial Crisis. This is more of a long-term view of our asset quality. You can see here that our non-current loans significantly outperformed our Federal Reserve peer group through the last crisis. Additionally, our loss content was also significantly less than our peers during that timeframe. Let's turn on deposits for a second. We do maintain a very strong deposit base. Currently, about 26% of our deposits are in non-interest- bearing. For the year of 2024, we did have tremendous deposit success. We grew deposits $1.1 billion in 2024. If you exclude the brokered runoff, it was approximately $1.4 billion in growth. This slide shows our liquidity position and some additional deposit detail.
You can see that our uninsured deposits stand at 32%, while our insured and collateralized are at 68%. We currently have $12.3 billion in immediate available liquidity and our estimated total liquidity at $21 billion. Rick talked about our strong capital position. You can see that on this slide here. Our CET1 is over 14%, tangible equity to tangible assets at 11%. And we do currently have 4.37 million shares outstanding under our board-approved share repurchase program as of 12/31. And also, as Rick mentioned, we do have the ability to repurchase stock given our strong capital position. Next, let me switch gears and talk about M&A for a minute. So this slide shows our acquisition history since 2013. We have completed six transactions since that time. And most recent deal, Piedmont, closed on January 10th.
As you can see here, Piedmont was headquartered in Peachtree Corners, Georgia, $2.4 billion in assets and $2.1 billion in loans and deposits. It was an all-stock deal, and we did retain all key senior management, and Monty Watson, the former CEO, is now the regional president for United in Georgia. This slide shows one of the reasons why we're so excited about this deal. Obviously, you can see the Atlanta market, sixth largest market in the U.S. by population, and is home to 18 Fortune 500 companies, and the population growth there in Atlanta is expected to continue to remain very strong. This deal also was financially compelling, and we're projecting about 7.6% EPS accretion on a GAAP basis, with about 3.5% tangible book value dilution that we earn back in 2.8 years. Last two slides that I have today really summarize our 2025 outlook and our investment thesis.
This slide summarizes our 2025 guidance. Overall, we are forecasting mid-single-digit loan and deposit growth rates. We do think the loan growth rate will occur more in the second half of the year. We do know of some larger payoffs that are going to hit in Q1, Q2 timeframe, where those loans are being refinanced into the secondary market. Might slow the growth rates a little bit in the first half. Obviously, we'll have the acquisition kicking in and should expect to see growth picking up in the second half of the year. Overall, we are forecasting net interest income to be between $1.02 billion and $1.05 billion. Provisions estimated at $33 million, excluding the Day 2 provision. On the expense side, we expect to be in the $600 million-$620 million range, excluding the one-time deal charges.
And as we've mentioned a couple of times, we do have a significant excess capital position, with the buyback providing some nice optionality for us in 2025. So last slide I have today, just wanted to highlight our investment thesis for UBSI. We do believe we have one of the premier Mid-Atlantic and Southeast franchises. We do have a strong mix of high-growth MSAs and smaller stable markets where we have a strong market share position. We have consistently been a high-performing company with a culture of discipline, risk management, and expense control. In our 51 consecutive years of dividend increases, evidence is United's strong profitability, solid asset quality, and sound capital management over a very long period of time. We do have an experienced management team with a proven track record of execution.
We are committed to our mission of excellence and service to our employees, our customers, our shareholders, and our communities. We do think we have an attractive valuation with a current P/E ratio of about 12.4x, based upon the median 2025 Street consensus estimate of $2.88. That does conclude our presentation today. We would be happy to answer any questions that anyone may have. Thank you.
Thanks, Mark. Thanks, Rick. Maybe just one question for me to start it off here. With the changes in Washington going on and with everything going with DOGE, just curious, have you guys thought about maybe tightening any underwriting standards or shifting away from certain loan products? Or is it still too early to tell?
I would say that we have.
The office lending downtown, you talk about lending to the government on a building, sounds like a great tenant, but we really don't like single-tenant stuff of any kind. So I think that our lending was such that the way we've been doing it consistently really doesn't require any changes. Similarly, the government contracting space, which is another, as you know, that's getting a lot of attention. We had bought some banks years ago that had some government contracting groups that kind of focused on that lower to middle market, GovCon tier. That's really not something that we are comfortable with. We got out of that type of business a long time ago. We focus on kind of the larger higher-tier client.
And I think really, even with all of the DOGE discussion, I think the impact in the GovCon space is going to be on that lower to middle-type contractor. I think they're the ones that are going to take it on the chin. I think it's going to drive some consolidation in that business. But I think the higher end, those larger companies, national companies that are focused on IT, AI, defense, stuff like that, I think those folks are still going to do well despite all of the DOGE. And from a residential real estate, I guess that would be the kind of the third leg of the stool that everybody's talking about. Historically, we used to have three different delivery channels in the mortgage space. We were a large player in the mortgage space, but we have significantly reined that in.
We've combined all three of those into one, and our goal was to make it a more efficient, smaller piece of the pie. We still want to be able to do that for our good clients, but it's really a business that in a lot of ways, we already scaled back a long time ago. So I don't think there's anything that we're doing right now today to respond. I think the things that we've done in the past are serving us well during this difficult time.
Well, thank you very much, Rick. And I know with that, we're pretty much out of time here, so.
I told Mark to talk till all the way to the end. He wasn't supposed to allow any questions about it. We'll work on that. But thank you. We appreciate it.
Great to have you guys here. Thank you very much, everybody.