The Wilbur Ross controlled American Home Mortgage Servicing Inc., Coppell, Texas, has a new name: Homeward Residential to go along with its master plan to become a full service mortgage banking firm.
In a press statement released Friday AHMSI said the name change should be completed by midyear.
The privately held company entered the originating space this past fall through the launch of a correspondent and warehouse lending division. Among residential servicers it ranks 14th nationwide, according to figures compiled by National Mortgage News and the Quarterly Data Report.
Over the past two years AHMSI has hired a handful of veteran mortgage managers, including senior executives from Residential Capital Corp./GMAC.
At Sept. 30 it held $71 billion of mortgage servicing rights, a 14% drop over 12 months.
Launched a few years back by Ross and his investor group, AHMSI was originally built by combining two servicing shops: Option One Mortgage Corp., and American Home Mortgage, Melville, N.Y. But AHMSI's biggest problem has been MSR run-off, hence its entry into lending.
AHMSI CEO David Applegate, a former GMAC executive himself, said in a statement the new identity is “not simply a name change. Over the past 12 months we have built a full-service mortgage banking enterprise with a broad spectrum of offerings and expertise in lending, servicing and a variety of related services.”
Besides servicing and now lending, the company has expanded into loan closing services, REO management, home valuation, and asset management consulting.
Ross' other mortgage-related interests include a $100 million loan he made to Capital Markets Cooperative, a secondary marketing firm in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla. CMC recently bought Cunningham & Co., a mortgage firm based in North Carolina.
