New Servicer Racks Up Assignments
Reprinted from www.ABAlert.com
Strategic Recovery, a company that specializes in collecting on charged-off mortgages, is seeing business surge for a special-servicing unit it launched after the credit market tanked last year.
The new operation, Acqura Loan Services, works on behalf of clients seeking payment on defaulted mortgages and home-equity loans that haven’t gone through foreclosure yet, along with smaller amounts of potentially troublesome assets that are still current. In many cases, the assignments are coming from hedge funds that bought portfolios of non-performing mortgages ejected from securitization pools.
<>So far, Acqura has picked up three special-servicing mandates covering $100 million of loans, all from hedge funds. It has five or six similar arrangements in the pipeline as well, and expects to be working on $1 billion of credits by yearend, said David Vida, who serves as chief executive of both Acqura and Strategic Recovery Group.
That anticipated rush of business can be attributed to widespread troubles among mortgage pools. The company initially expected to pursue a full spectrum of servicing work, with the intent of securing a primary-servicer rating in mid-2008. Now those plans are on hold indefinitely as Acqura concentrates on its special-servicing duties. “We started working on the special-servicer business three years ago, and there wasn’t much interest,” Vida said. Now, “there are a lot of opportunistic buyers getting into the market, and they need us.”
The firm is also talking to a number of lenders and banks that want to bolster their own loan-servicing operations, Vida said. Special servicers collect payments on non-performing loans, liquidate repossessed assets and manage foreclosures.
Acqura evaluates individual loan performance daily, while working with borrowers to develop payment plans, modify loan terms and head off missed payments. Like its Plano, Texas, parent, the firm handles credits that in some cases used to be part of securitization pools. However, it also has the capacity to work on bond deals as a sub-servicer.
The 10-year-old Strategic Recovery, whose collection business encompasses $450 million of bad home-equity loans and other credits, employs 40 staffers. That includes 10 loan-recovery specialists who work for Acqura.
