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.
- Bear Stearns halts lending in Irvine, cuts 150 jobs
- Lehman Brothers and O.C.
- CA agency sees big foreclosure jump for O.C.
- SEC Chair on subprime investigations and global response to credit crunch
- Lehman lays off 850 more people, O.C. impact not known
I hope that you can see we are still a long way from bottom. What does thoughless and sighbordud have to say about the latest news from Data Quick? With 22.8% less than 2007 it does not bode well for Steve Thomas and his fuzzy math
Matt, I was also told that the way Accredited was “shut down” was that at the exact same time at all the offices, a group of “suits” walked in all the offices and proceeded to anounce the takeover. I am not sure as to why and I do know that in the last month Accredited was very aggressive in their lending.
Lou Pacific
Real Estate and Mortgage Company Consultant
Serving OC for 30 Years
this was only the loan service portion. they stopped lending in august of last year.