been here, most of them, for about a year,

been here, most of them, for about a year, that probably should have

been marketed. We can’t do anything about that. ”

Those 37 are in the Atlanta region, which lies east of the Mississippi, stretching from the Gulf coast to Maryland. Nationwide, there are approximately 100 institutions sharing Liberty’s unresolved status. The cost of resolution — the purchase of Liberty’s assets and liabilities by another bank — is, Pace estimates, “in the low millions.”

In addition to being moved to the administration’s back burner, as tax bills and health care reform move forward, Pace said that some market forces are at work in the slowed pace of resolution as well.

“We have saturated a good bit of the market. We’ve had the Crestars and the First Unions, all the big guys have taken about all they can swallow. The market is probably limited to some extent, but I think the market for this size institution is always good. There are a lot of interested people,” he reiterated.

But just because the institution itself has not been sold does not mean that Pace and the Liberty staff have not been hard at work in disposing of some of Liberty’s holdings.

“[The RTC] had an auction back last year in which we participated,” Pace explained. “Actually, we put some of our properties in tw'o auctions and we sold about nine pieces of property out of some 25 pieces of [Liberty’s] property that way. They were a mix of condos, some office and commercial property, and a few single families, but not a large amount,” he said.

“Those were selected properties out of our portfolio of real estate that we felt would be logical to auction. We retained much of our property to just sell on a slower basis. The results of that auction were pretty good, as auctions go, as far as our return,” he said.

The slower-based sales, which employ standard marketing techniques, have further helped reduce Liberty’s original package of 24