VCNB Sells Home Mortgage Division

After losing $12.1 million in 1993, Ventura County National Bank moved this week to sell its home mortgage division and refocus its energy on the commercial banking business, bank officials said Friday.

The bank’s mortgage wing was bought by CUB Funding Corp. of Calabasas for an undisclosed percentage of the division’s future profits, said Peter Banks, chief financial officer at Ventura County National Bank.

Banks said CUB will make the division more profitable than it was for VCNB, and the bank’s own earnings from new mortgages will increase.

“CUB is more efficient at doing this than Ventura County National Bank,” Banks said.

“If they do it better, that means they can do it at a lower cost, and there’s more revenue potential.”

Six of the mortgage division’s 20 employees will be laid off, and the rest will continue to work in the same offices under its new name, Ventura County National Mortgage, Banks said.

CUB Funding Corp. is a division of the former California United Bancorp that was bought late last year by Republic Bancorp of Ann Arbor, Mich. Republic has more than $1 billion in assets and wrote $5 billion in mortgage loans last year, $1 billion of them in California, VCNB officials said.