 per share increased to $15.77, tangible book value to $11.75 per share. This is a higher jump than you would expect to see purely from the accretion of the net income, and that's because of a $0.22 increase resulting from the change in tax laws that allowed us finally after a number of quarters of negotiation in our legislature to allow us to recognize the full benefits of the acquired BOLI, so this $5 million addition to tangible book value is certainly very welcome news.
We're seeing that our profitability ratios as a result of all those various movements in the balance sheet and in the income statement continue to improve. Most notably, the return on average assets, which is the metric that we use most frequently to measure our progress is 78 basis points. Our return on average tangible assets is 81 basis points, and we always try to point out the cost of the CDI expense, the core deposit intangible that we acquired with the First Mariner acquisition, which everyone will remember was a much larger number than had been anticipated at the time of the acquisition due to a movement in interest rate.
And while that's a rapidly-amortizing asset, it does on both a core net income perspective and a tangible book value perspective distort the numbers. And so we're asking everybody to look at the 88 basis point return on average assets net of CDI.
We also know that the acquisition allowed us to achieve certain efficiencies from an operating perspective in the addition of a large headquarters building. That combined with our goodwill has made our nonearning assets slightly larger than peers. And so purely for informational purposes, we'll also share that the return on average earning assets again net of that CDI intangible expense is a little over 1%, and we're following all of those numbers on an ongoing basis.
Our organic loan growth continues to be focused primarily on commercial and it's based on building longer-term profitable client relationships. We continue to be very cautious in how we view our portfolio in this market because we see an economy moving closer to the latter stages of expansion.
Different underwriting standards, much tighter interest rate spread, longer fixed rate terms and some basic shifts in the cap values of our companies with out-of-market borrowers paying premium prices for properties and businesses reflecting the liquidity that still is in the market. But we are emphasizing the loan originations that we are able to achieve even with these tighter underwriting standards, and they are only being offset by the runoff that's exacerbated by those lending activities.
And we remind everybody, and if we look at this chart on Page 6, that our long-term loan organic CAGR for Howard since 2013 is 19.9%. That excludes all of the results of acquired loans in our serial acquisition, and it also includes the $400 million in organically-originated loans at First Mariner after their recapitalization. So we're confident that even with this lending environment, that we will continue to return to those types of growth and are still on target for a mid- to high-single-digit growth by the end of the fourth quarter. We continue to maintain strong capital ratios, but in -- which in this kind of an economic environment is also critically important.
Risk-based capital, which is the measure that we use most frequently because of our mix of earning assets being oriented more towards loans than to securities, increased to 12.62%, again in part because of the clean net income quarter that we had but also due to the onetime change in the BOLI moving out of goodwill. And our Tier 1 leverage ratio, which is a ratio that's followed by a growing number of our community banking peers increased to over the 9% level this quarter.
Margin, as I noted before, has been remarkably stable. And while it showed an anticipated modest drop because of the subordinated debt, if you look at the chart on Page 8, you will see both that the margin on our core basis has been very stable and also that despite the acquisitions over a long period of time, we're relatively unimpacted by fair market value noise in those numbers.
And finally, we look at the asset quality focus. As a reminder, when we bought our bank that was 3 years past a recapitalization, we saw an initial jump in our NPAs and our net charge-offs. We very aggressively worked down those NPA numbers, and you see them going from a 1.67% to a 1.13%.
We did incur in the fourth quarter a provision of $2.4 million, and that provision was converted to a charge-off in the first quarter. As we converted that specific provision to a charge-off, it impacted the company's historical loss ratios.
And so for this 1 additional quarter, there was an overhang from that same loan. The amount of the charge-off was not in excess. In fact it was relatively below the provision number, but because of what it does to our historical loss numbers, it meant that our general reserves were increased because of that charge-off. We've also been more conservative in applying certain provisions and general reserves to our pass-rated credits, and that is reflected in that larger provision as well, but no large new charge-offs or specific provisions and a very consistent trending down in NPAs to total assets.
So in summary, this is a good quarter. We're beginning to see the results of the increased scale, in that it actually is providing us with clean, transparent growth in return. It's reflected in the net income that we show, it's reflected in the lower noninterest expenses, and we would remind everybody that we believe there's a continued focus on other opportunities, especially as we focus on customer behaviors and how that impacts our branch network.
We are extraordinarily focused on both asset quality and capital buffers because of where we believe we may be in the economic cycle, and we're maintaining disciplined underwriting and loan structuring, but we are able because of our lower cost of funding versus peers to continue to offer competitive loan pricing to the highest quality credits in our market. And finally, the rationale for all of the activities in the last year is that we have very differentiated positioning as the largest locally headquartered bank in an SME-dominated market.
Greater Baltimore is a good market, one that tends to be overlooked by most of our local and national competitors, and the fact that we are seeing a much stronger loan origination pipeline and a modest increase in our average balances last quarter makes us believe that, that differentiating positioning, which was the rationale for the acquisition, will continue to play out in our numbers going forward.
We provided a lot of information in the Appendix on our loan mix, our noninterest income mix, our funding mix and the components of our noninterest expense.
We're happy to address any questions on the regular presentation or on that appendix. But as I promised, I'd really like to turn it over to all of you, so that you might be able to ask your questions.
(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from the line of Catherine Mealor with KBW.
I'd like to start with just the margin and wanted to see if you could give us some updated thoughts on your outlook for the margin now that we've got the sub debt fully in, and how you're thinking about the margin in a flat rate environment?
Okay. I guess the positive news is that the margin for the first quarter came in about where we expected. When we did the sub debt, we projected that the impact of that would be between 10 and 12 basis points, and that carried through for the first quarter. We are seeing continued pressure, even though somewhat lessened at the pace on the deposit funding side. It's not nearly as competitive as it was probably 3 months ago but the pressure is still there. So that's continuing. We are, at least through the first quarter, seeing a slight uptick in some of the loan yields. Based on pricing, we're hopeful that, that continues, but that's the piece that could cause the margin to compress slightly. But overall, there's really nothing that we would expect that would have a material impact on the overall margin. We do have the pricing pressures but so far we've been able to mitigate that through loan yields, and we believe we can continue to do that, at a more modest level, but continue to do that going forward.
Great. And then -- and have about on the growth side. What's your outlook for growth? And is part of your ability to maintain a flatter margin dependent on growth kind of staying in the single-digit range? Or I guess we can start just from your outlook for growth this year?
Yes, Catherine, it's Rob Kunisch. What I would tell you is we have a strong pipeline right now. Over the last 4 months or 5 months, we had some turnover initially within the lending group at the senior level position. We have that settled down, and our loan officers have been out working aggressively. So we have a very strong pipeline right now, stronger than -- the strongest that I've seen it since the merger. As George mentioned, there is pressure on rate there, which is just the environment that we're living in. So although I don't want to give you any specific numbers in terms of where I think that's going to come in because, based on the timing of a lot of the commercial loans, it's just hard. We project a lot of them to come in, in the second quarter, but things get pushed out because of appraisals or delays, because of equipment delivery dates and things of that nature. So not sure that answers your question, but I would tell you the pipeline's strong.
And Catharine, I'm reluctant to give you any specific numbers, but I would say that if you looked at our balance sheet today, you would also see growth in the loan portfolio and more market growth