Accredited Home Lenders, a San Diego-based subprime lender, has laid off an undisclosed number of workers and closed its Orange office and a few other offices outside the county, according to National Mortgage News and the Implode-O-Meter Web site.

The news this week follows Friday’s reports by Housing Wire and Bloomberg that investor Lone Star Funds, which owns Accredited, bought certain mortgage operations and assets from ailing investment bank Bear Stearns, which itself was recently acquired by rival JP Morgan Chase & Co. It’s all part of the massive mortgage and banking shake up still well underway, as the housing market continues its decline.

Details of the Bear-Lone Star deal are a bit sketchy but it appears Lone Star picked up what was left of the Irvine-based subprime lender Encore Credit, which Bear acquired last year. Bear Stearns, or better to say JP Morgan, still owns Lewisville, Texas-based EMC Mortgage Corp., a servicer and before the credit crunch also an originator of subprime loans. EMC has an office in Irvine.

Housing Wire, which tracks the mortgage industry, reported last week that it received an internal Lone Star memo on the Bear deal and later confirmed the memo’s contents with a Lone Star spokesman.

It would appear Lone Star is scaling back Accredited, which it bought in October for around $296 million, and will rely more one the mortgage operations it picked up from Bear.

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The percentage of loans on which borrowers missed one payment dropped in March vs. a month earlier for people with good, bad or in-between credit, according to an industry report released last week that tracked loans which have been turned into securities and sold to investors.

Michael Youngblood of Friedman Billings Ramsey Investment Management, which published the report, wrote that the shift from rising delinquencies will likely be short lived. The change was due to a modest spring boost to the housing market and the limited success of government-lead efforts to refinance folks struggling with their mortgages, he said.

But later this year delinquencies are likely to rise due to weak labor and housing market conditions, Youngblood said.

The percent of prime loans 30-days late dipped to 0.83 percent in March from 0.89 in February. For the same period, subprime slipped to 8.61 percent from 8.83 percent, and Alt-A, an in-between category, dipped to 3.97 percent from 4.11 percent.

However, loans more days past due generally rose over the same period. For example, loans 90 days late rose for all three credit types, with subprime hitting 9.67 percent from 9.38 percent, while subprime loans in foreclosure rose to 11.47 percent from 10.99 percent.

Another way of looking at it: 58.76 percent of subprime loans were current on March 31 vs. 59.64 percent on February 29 and 77.65 percent on March 31, 2007. For prime 97.78 percent were current on March 31 of this year and for Alt-A, 83.54 percent were current (both credit types down slightly from February).

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