The strong level of production is a result of the investments we have made over the past few years to diversify our banking platform bringing in experienced talent across a variety of lending areas and an upgrade to our systems and process to allow us to be more responsive and efficient lenders. As we have talked about in the past year, our focus in loan production has been in C&I and Construction Lending, in order to take advantage of the higher yields it provide, as well as SBA Lending in order to boost our non-interest income to gain on sale. And we’re pleased with the progress we’ve made in all three areas. We had $72 million in C&I loan originations during the fourth quarter, which was the largest component of our production.
The biggest contributor to our C&I production was our Franchise Lending business which had $58 million in originations. This is the strongest quarter we’ve had since acquiring this team. We are definitely seeing the benefits from an increase in Business Development that we projected when we acquired the group in early 2014. When we acquired this business the team was limited to banking, the franchisees of eight brands. They now have approval to pursue 25 of the top-tier brands and they have already developed lending relationships with franchisees of 18 of them. So this business is really delivering the results we expected.
We are still a relatively small player in the Franchise Lending market, so even with the growth we have seen this year there is still plenty of opportunity to take market share. The remainder of our C&I loan production was broad-based across a variety of industries and concentrated in our primary markets within Southern California. We had $56 million in construction loan production in the fourth quarter, as we continue to get good results from the additions we made in our Construction Lending team. We have very good relationships with seasoned developers throughout Southern California. As a result of our focus on the higher yielding franchise and construction loans, we have been able to keep the weighted average rate on our loan originations above 5%.
The third area of focus for the past year — SBA Lending had a strong quarter as well. We originated $26 million in SBA loans in the fourth quarter, which was our largest quarter of the year and continued the higher production trends we saw throughout 2014. As a result of the increases in our SBA business, the gain on sale income has become a larger contributor to our overall revenue mix. During the fourth quarter, we made additional investments in the SBA group by recruiting and hiring a number of seasoned loan officers and credit personnel that we expect will benefit our production levels later in the first half of 2015. While our primarily focus is on the three lending areas I mentioned, we also want to continue to have a balanced production across all of our business lines and that’s exactly what we got in the fourth quarter. We had an additional $37 million in Commercial Real Estate production and $17 million in Multifamily Loans. So we are seeing good results across all of our businesses which is helping us to build the highly diversified loan portfolio with both attractive yields and exceptional credit quality.
Turning to deposits, we continue to see a nice pickup in inflows during the fourth quarter, particularly in core deposits as more of our commercial customers transfer over their deposit relationships and our HOA unit continues to generate new business relationships. From the end of the prior quarter, we had a $38 million increase in money market deposits and a $32 million increase in non-interest bearing deposits.
