First Place Announces Withdrawal Of Registration Statement

WARREN, Ohio, July 22, 2010 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- First Place Financial Corp. (Nasdaq:FPFC) today announced that it has filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission to withdraw its registration statement, filed in June 2010, to sell approximately $80 million of Common Stock due to unfavorable market conditions.

"Market conditions have changed significantly since we began the process of preparing our registration statement in late April," noted Steven R. Lewis, President and CEO. "We embarked on this process in order to build shareholder value by pursuing strategic growth opportunities. We believe that building shareholder value is economically feasible only if the benefits from the opportunity to grow more than offset the immediate dilution to existing shareholders. Current market conditions would result in more dilution than we found acceptable. Therefore, we have decided to withdraw our registration statement at this time. We considered the sale of common stock to be an offensive strategy from the beginning. Throughout this recession and through the date of this release we have remained well capitalized based on regulatory standards."

Mr. Lewis continued, "The registration statement indicated a comprehensive capital strategy including issuing common stock, exchanging preferred stock for trust preferred securities with the U. S. Department of the Treasury and the sale of a significant portion of our nonperforming assets. While we are no longer taking any steps to market our common stock, we continue to pursue various alternatives related to an exchange of our preferred stock for other forms of Tier 1 capital, and potentially selling limited amounts of nonperforming assets."

"In April, we also indicated that we were continuing to aggressively pursue the resolution of problem assets through the June quarter and that we projected continued reductions in nonperforming loans. While charge-offs are still high by historical standards, our charge-offs, delinquent loans, nonperforming loans and nonperforming assets were lower for the June 2010 quarter than they were for the March 2010 quarter."