Oregon-based Willamette Valley Bank plans to move its Coeur d’Alene home-loan center by summer into a new building on Sherman Avenue at the east edge of downtown, says Steve Novotny, the bank’s Coeur d’Alene sales manager and one of its loan officers.

The new mortgage branch will occupy 3,600 square feet of space at 704 E. Sherman, in the Plaza on Sherman building, Novotny says.

When it opens on Sherman, the branch won’t be a consumer-banking branch, but will specialize in home loans, as the Coeur d’Alene branch does now at its temporary location at 850 W. Ironwood Drive, he says.

“We’re a mortgage division of a community bank,” Novotny says. Willamette Valley Bank’s parent company, Oregon Bancorp. Inc., is based in Salem, Ore., while its home-loan division is based in Wilsonville, and its commercial lending division is based in Portland.

Novotny says Willamette Bank has 11 Coeur d’Alene-based employees and will add another employee before the Sherman branch opens.

Willamette Valley Bank has 16 home-loan centers, including two other Idaho branches—one in Priest River and the other in Boise. The bank has two home-loan branches in Western Washington. The other mortgage branches and the bank’s four consumer bank branches are in Oregon.

Novotny says most of the Coeur d’Alene center’s borrowers live in Kootenai County, although he adds the bank has relationships with real estate agents on the Washington side of the state line.

“We do loans in the Spokane area on a consistent basis,” he says. “We’re licensed in all 50 states.”

The Coeur d’Alene team formerly worked for a branch of Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Goldwater Bank that had been located in the Riverstone development, but it left that bank last year to open a mortgage office for Willamette Valley Bank.

“The bank is trying to expand its mortgage division, which absolutely has been growing in the last six months,” Novotny says.

Willamette Valley Bank reported total assets of $130.8 million, including loans totaling $113.3 million, as of Dec. 31, up from total assets of $119.4 million, including loans totaling $93.4 million, a year earlier.

The Plaza on Sherman is a recently developed 5,300-square-foot, two-tenant structure at the southeast corner of Sherman Avenue and Seventh Street. A Subway sandwich restaurant is the other tenant there.