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Embattled mortgage servicer Ocwen Financial faces up to $26 billion in damage claims by bondholders and a greater risk of being fired as a mortgage servicer on thousands of small, private-label trusts.
February 27 -
It's not quite too big to fail, but Ocwen is the country's largest servicer of subprime mortgages. So if it were forced to sell itself, or even failed, the transfer of some $410 billion in servicing rights could create havoc in the mortgage market, industry experts said.
February 23 -
California's Department of Business Oversight said Friday that it will drop its effort to suspend Ocwen Loan Servicing's mortgage license in California. The Atlanta servicer had failed for more than a year to provide its California regulator with requested information
January 23
Ocwen Financial has delayed filing its 2014 results and announced the sale of more servicing rights.
The embattled Atlanta servicer was initially expected to report fourth-quarter and full-year results on Monday. In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing Wednesday, Ocwen said that while it expects to file its 10-K by March 23, it can give "no assurance that it will be able to do so."
Ocwen said it is reviewing the ability of an affiliate, Home Loan Servicing Solutions, to fund new servicing advances, warning that a failure to do so could have "a material negative impact on its financial condition."
Home Loan Servicing, which is
Ocwen also said its auditor is determining
Separately, Ocwen has agreed to sell $9.6 billion on servicing rights to a unit of Walter Investment, which owns Green Tree Servicing. That portfolio consists of roughly 55,000 loans backed by Freddie Mac, Ocwen said in a statement Wednesday. The deal is expected to close by April 30.
"We are pleased with the progress we are making on executing our plan," Ocwen Chief Executive Ron Faris said in the statement. "Over the next several months, we expect to generate proceeds of at least $650 million from sales and transfers of mortgage servicing rights"
The sale is consistent with Faris' pledge to streamline the company as it deals with increased regulatory scrutiny. In December, Faris said the company would sell some of its $1.7 trillion in agency servicing rights, backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and in March, Ocwen said it had signed a letter of intent to sell $45 billion of servicing rights on 277,000 home loans.
It did not identify the buyer at the time but Bloomberg reported Wednesday that the buyer is JPMorgan Chase, citing a person familiar with the transaction. That sale is expected to close in the second half of this year.
