Residential Credit’s Servicing Ops Recognized by S&P

Residential Credit Solutions, Inc. said recently that it had been named a “select servicer” by Standard & Poor’s Rating Services, one of only a few residential subprime and special servicers to be added to the rating agency’s list in the past few months. RCS was founded in December 2006, and is is a mortgage investment and servicing company exclusively focused on providing servicing capacity and capital to the residential mortgage markets. The servicing platform currently manages approximately $1 billion in performing and non-performing residential mortgage loans and has over 122 employees in offices in Fort Worth, Los Angeles and New York. RCS is another entrant in the increasingly crowded “high-touch special servicing” segment that targets aggressive — and higher margin — loss mitigation efforts designed to increase workouts for investors and other owners of mortgage credit risk. HW has covered the emergence of the space extensively in that past few months, including the launch of Plano, Texas-based Acqura Loan Services. The company isn’t just a servicing shop, however, and has adopted a model popularized by the former C-BASS/Litton Loan Servicing model; the company takes principal ownership of residential mortgage credit risk on many of the loans it services, and is backed by private equity firm Equifin Capital Partners and Och-Ziff Capital Management Group. “We are pleased that S&P has recognized RCS for our expertise in investing, managing and collecting servicing-intensive mortgage assets,” said Dennis Stowe, president of RCS. Stowe himself is the former president and COO at Saxon Capital, Inc. where he had primary responsibility for building its servicing operations from an 18-person organization to one that ultimately serviced $25 billion in non-conforming mortgages; Saxon is now a unit of Morgan Stanley. Somewhat fittingly as well given the current crisis, Stowe cut his teeth managing portfolios of consumer and commercial mortgages on behalf of the FDIC and the RTC during the savings and loan crisis of the early 1990s. Let’s just say that RTC experience is suddenly much more valuable in residential mortgage markets than it used to be.