The credit crisis taking its toll on parts of Nashville’s banking sector could be setting the stage for a clear 2009 division of the haves and the have-nots.

A NashvilleFiles.com analysis of Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. third-quarter filings shows that four of the top nine banks based in Middle Tennessee or doing most of their business here trimmed their loan portfolios from July to September. Among them were No. 2 GreenBank and No. 5 Bank of Nashville, the latter of which chopped $85 million from its books during the quarter.

Bank of Nashville Vice President Anne Livingston said the drop is due largely to the fact that the bank sold about $67 million of loans to some of its Synovus Financial Corp. sister banks that were looking to diversify their portfolios. At the end of October, she said, Bank of Nashville’s portfolio was down $42 million from a year ago.

As a group, the four large community banks who trimmed their loan exposures – they also include First Federal Bank in Dickson and Farmers Bank in Portland – did so by 3.4 percent. Two smaller banks, Community Bank & Trust in Ashland City and Citizens Savings Bank & Trust, also ended the quarter with smaller portfolios.

By comparison, the other banks in the locally based top 10 grew their portfolios by 5 percent during the third quarter. Leading the way were Pinnacle Financial Partners, Tennessee Commerce Bank and Avenue Bank, which together added $268 million in loans last quarter. (Note that the numbers for Pinnacle, which is growing quickly in Knoxville, and Tennessee Commerce, which runs lending offices in Birmingham and Minneapolis, include more money being lent outside the Nashville market.)

Wynne Baker, member in charge of KraftCPAs’ banking practice, said that dichotomy sets up that group for further growth in 2009 while the banks cutting back will essentially be in a holding pattern.

“I don’t think this quarter will be any better,” Baker said. “I would imagine that regulators are telling them to take a hard look at their whole portfolio and see where they are.”

It appears the tight lending environment will be with us for a while.

Jeff Cornwall, director of the Center for Entrepreneurship at Belmont’s Massey School of Business, wrote on his blog that small-business bankers aren’t ready to jump back into the market.

“They are telling me that with the tight margins created by the interest rate cuts, they will be very stingy with new lending for entrepreneurial deals [for] the foreseeable future,” Cornwall wrote. “And that was before the recent cut by the Fed.”

One silver lining, albeit a thin one: Baker said Nashville’s community banks appear to be in better shape and more willing to lend than in many other cities.