Pinnacle’s real estate fallout
When Pinnacle Financial Partners got started 10 years ago, the bank’s executives, who had survived many a past real estate collapse, pledged to focus lending on business and industry — not real estate development.
Now, the bank is beset by loan problems linked to real estate and homebuilding plans gone awry across Middle Tennessee, quite the opposite of its original goals.
This much seems clear: A series of acquisitions of suburban banks in the past few years shifted a larger concentration of the bank’s loans into real estate development in fast-growing areas around Nashville, leading to questions about how smart its bank purchases truly were.
The fallout has been severe.