Bank of the Ozarks history

After graduating in 1977, he overlapped briefly with Hillary at the Rose Law Firm, where he worked mostly on bank mergers and securities filings.

On his first day as Chairman and CEO in 1979, Mr.

She’d worked for the bank since 1980 and remains a director and loan-committee member.

In 1986, after getting divorced from Ross, with whom he has two sons, Gleason married his current wife, Linda.

September 1993 – First Community Bank of the Ozarks was chartered as First Community Bank of Taney County by the late Melvin Hall family in Branson, Missouri.

An opportunity arose in 1994 when banks in Arkansas were able to expand into other counties.

A big reason has been the Real Estate Specialties Group, a unit Gleason started in Dallas in 2003 with the help of Dan Thomas, an attorney and accountant there.

December of 2004 – The bank’s name was changed to First Community Bank of the Ozarks.

Richard Atkinson, one of Gleason’s law professors at UA Fayetteville, recalled in 2005 that Gleason was special when he was a student.

Bank of the Ozarks came here in 2010 when it bought the failed Horizon Bank of Bradenton, a critically undercapitalized bank with $188 million in assets and four offices.

In 2012, First Community Bank was acquired by Donald Combs and sons Kendall and Randall Combs.

Ozarks didn’t have a New York office until 2013; this year, industry watcher the Real Deal named it the city’s third-biggest construction lender.

The Little Rock-headquartered bank, with 253 offices in 10 states, also changed its ticker symbol to “OZK” on the Nasdaq. It has become one of the nation's biggest construction lenders, with profits rising almost fourfold since 2014, according to Bloomberg.

But the concern raised by Muddy Waters’ Block in May 2016, that Ozarks’ growth will prove unsustainable, hadn’t gone away. “You have people in the media who don’t understand our business,” Gleason lamented. “You end up with some ridiculous headlines and stories.”

After a big run that pushed average Manhattan condominium and co-op prices above $2 million, they dropped more than 8 percent in one year, starting in April 2017.