Former Countrywide Executives…New Game
I just read this on The Real Estate Bloggers
When morals and ethics don’t bother oneself, it is not that hard to make money. Some of the former Countrywide executives that ran homeowners into the ground lending money they could not pay back have now started a new company, PennyMac.
The new company is buying foreclosures for pennies on the dollar and then reselling them. Not a bad business, but it looks slimy when you were the ones who created the business model that created this mess.
Stanford L. Kurland, Countrywide’s former president, and his team have been buying up delinquent home mortgages that the government took over from other failed banks, sometimes for pennies on the dollar. They get a piece of what they can collect.
“It has been very successful — very strong,” John Lawrence, the company’s head of loan servicing, told Mr. Kurland one recent morning in a glass-walled boardroom here at PennyMac’s spacious headquarters, opened last year in the same Los Angeles suburb where Countrywide once flourished.
“In fact, it’s off-the-charts good,” he told Mr. Kurland, who was leaning back comfortably in his leather boardroom chair, even as the financial markets in New York were plunging. NYTimes.com.