Mortgage servicer Ocwen Financial Corp., which announced earlier this year that it would temporarily suspend its servicing of agency-backed mortgages until it gets its regulatory issues ironed out, reports that it is reducing its workforce at its Waterloo, Iowa, facility by about 300 employees.
All impacted employees will have the opportunity to apply for employment at other Ocwen facilities, including 130 open positions at the company's Coppell, Texas facility, Ocwen says in a release.
The company is also seeking to lease approximately half of its 155,000-square-foot facility in Waterloo.
‘We understand the impact that these decisions have on our employees, their families and the community,’ says Ronald Faris, president and CEO of Ocwen, in a release. ‘This was not an easy decision to make, but a necessary one, as we look to transform Ocwen to ensure long-term success. We appreciate all the support and dedication our Waterloo employees have shown over the years, and we look forward to remaining part of the Waterloo business community.’
Earlier this month, government-sponsored enterprise Freddie Mac announced that it had selected winning bidders in the sale of about $1.1 billion in nonperforming loans (NPLs) that are being serviced by Ocwen.
The sale included five separate pools with a total of 5,208 deeply delinquent NPLs.
LSF9 Mortgage Holdings, a private equity trust operated by Lone Star Funds, was the winning bidder for three of the pools, while Pretium Mortgage Credit Partners and OSAT Sponsor II bought the other two.
The loans are expected to transfer in October. The transfer of these loans will be highly sensitive as many are already in various stages of loss mitigation. Most are more than three years delinquent, according to Freddie Mac.
This was Freddie Mac's sixth NPL auction of the year. Freddie Mac and its sister company, Fannie Mae, started to sell off their NPLs to investors earlier this year in an effort to divest themselves of certain nonperforming assets and in order to reduce taxpayer risk.
In April, Freddie Mac auctioned a $233 million pool of NPLs serviced by Ocwen.
That sale and this most recent one are, in part, a result of Ocwen's recent efforts to reorganize after a spate of regulatory enforcement actions that resulted in the company deciding to discontinue servicing agency-backed mortgages.
