Branched out: last Beverly Hills Bancorp site is long way from Rodeo Drive.

THERE'S not much that a bank would seem to have in common with a professional baseball team- unless you're talking Beverly Hills Bancorp Inc.

The local holding company recently announced the sale of its Beverly Hills branch, First Bank of Beverly Hills, leaving the publicly traded firm with only a Calabasas location and an out-of-place corporate name.

"Well, the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim changed their name," quipped Larry Faigin, president of First Bank of Beverly Hills and its holding company.

Further complicating the name game: The branch's purchaser, the similarly-named First Banks Inc., a privately held bank based in St. Louis, Missouri.

Beverly Hills Bancorp will retain the First Bank of Beverly Hills name and the branch located at 175 S. Beverly Drive will be known as First Bank after the sale is finalized. The branch is set to open under the new ownership on Nov. 6.

"The bank definitely changes, and the customers will see the difference," said Jane Lief, senior vice president and regional manager for First Banks. "We offer a lot of products that bank did not."

Faigin said the company sold the branch to focus on its primary business of real estate lending, with the sale expected to close Nov. 4. "We are primarily a wholesale bank and we never had a branch system and our ability to provide the full range of banking services to our depositors just really never existed," Faigin said. "The branch was almost an orphan branch."

Under the terms of the deal, First Banks will assume all of the branch's deposits, and FirstBank of Beverly Hills will receive a premium of 5.5 percent of the branch's deposits at the deal's closing. As of June 30, the branch had about $156.5 million in deposits, and if the deal had closed on that date, First Bank of Beverly Hills would have received $8.6 million.

The company will continue to operate its Calabasas branch unchanged, and Faigin said he expects the bank to open a non-branch office in Beverly Hills in the near future.

On August 16, Beverly Hills Bancorp announced a stock buy-back, repurchasing 2.75 million shares. Faigin said that the buy-back was the result of pressure from shareholders who felt the company had excess capital and "wanted to have a liquidity opportunity to take advantage of."

With the branch sale almost complete and the stock buy-back on the books, Faigin said the Calabasas company plans to focus on new products like construction loans.

"We will refocus more heavily into real estate and I think the market will reward us for that," he said.