And finally our compensation and benefits cost increased $349,000, primarily due to an increase in personnel. We expect to recognize all the remaining Independence Bank merger-related expense during the first quarter, which should be approximately $6 million. Of course we encourage those modeling to take those costs into consideration. Outside of the additional expenses we’ll add through the Independence acquisition, we would expect the non-interest expense for the base business to increase modestly in 2015 in the range of 3% to 5% in order to support our continued growth.
Turning to our balance sheet, our loans increased $79.2 million or 5.2% from the end of the prior quarter, which was the result of the organic loan production that Steve discussed and $7.8 million in loan purchases. The loan growth was broad-based throughout the portfolio, and compared to the end of the prior quarter, C&I loans increased $67.5 million, Construction Loans increased $22.6 million and SBA loans increased $7.9 million. These increases were partially offset by a $27.0 million decrease in owner-occupied commercial real estate loans, which was primarily due to loan prepayment. As I mentioned earlier, we did some rebalancing in the securities portfolio which reduced the portfolio by $80.6 million from the end of the prior quarter. Following these sales, the duration of the portfolio declined to 3.1 years. Our total deposits were up $87.4 million or 5.7% during the fourth quarter. The increase was primarily in money markets, increasing $37.6 million, non-interest bearing deposits, increasing $31.6 million and CDs increasing $17.6 million. The growth in the CDs was primarily driven by $22.1 million in brokered CDs that we added with the weighted average term of 17 months in an all-in cost of 67 basis points. As with the brokered CDs we added in the third quarter, we wanted to lock-in longer term fundings to support our strong loan growth while also managing our interest rate risk.
Finally looking at asset quality, we continue to see good stability within the loan portfolio during the fourth quarter. Our Non-Performing Assets were virtually unchanged during the quarter and are still just 12 basis points of total assets. The loss experienced in the portfolio continues to be very low, and we had net loan recoveries of 12,000 during the quarter. We recorded a provision for loan losses of $1.4 million which was primarily related to the strong growth we had in the portfolio. This brought our allowance to total loans ratio to 75 basis points. Although when the fair market value discounts related to acquired loans are included in the total, then our ratio increases near 87 basis points. And we continue to have very strong coverage of our non-accrual loans with an allowance that represents 845% of our non-accruals at the end of the quarter. While we expect to continue to see very good credit quality in 2015, we expect to make continued steady progress in bringing our overall allowance level more in line with peers. Ultimately, we’d like to be in the 1% of total loans within the next 18 to 24 months. Given the continued growth we are expecting in the portfolio and our goal to raise the allowance level, we would expect our level of provision expense to be in the range of $1.5 million to $2.0 million per quarter in 2015.
With that, we’d be happy to answer any questions you have. Jamie, would you please open up the call?
