Servicing

Genworth Financial Inc., a mortgage insurer based in Richmond, Va., has priced a $1.9 billion public offering of four series of senior debt securities.The series are as follows: $500 million of three-year notes with a floating interest rate based on the three-month London interbank offered rate; $500 million of five-year notes with a 4.75% interest rate; $600 million of 10-year notes with a 5.75% interest rate; and $300 million of 30-year notes with a 6.50% interest rate. Genworth said that as a result of hedging arrangements, its effective interest rates on the series will be 3.5315% on the three-year notes, 4.478% on the five-year notes, 5.510% on the 10-year notes, and 6.349% on the 30-year notes. Citigroup Global Markets Inc., Deutsche Bank Securities Inc., and Lehman Brothers Inc. are the joint book-running managers of the offering.

Loan Protector Insurance Services, Solon, Ohio, has announced the formation of a new department dedicated to researching, processing, and verifying insurance documents for escrowed and impounded mortgage loans serviced by the company.Loan Protector, an outsourcer of customized mortgage insurance tracking and verification programs, said the department is headed by nine full-time escrow specialists. "The escrow department's sole focus is on servicing and processing issues related to escrowed or impounded loans," said Ron Wiser, president of Loan Protector. "As we noticed more and more escrowed loans coming in to be processed, we realized that there was a need for a separate department with a single focus." The company can be found on the Web at http://www.loanprotector.com.

The sudden resignation of its president, Alex Pollock, is forcing the Chicago Federal Home Loan Bank to initiate a search for a successor."We are very early in the process," Chicago FHLBank board chairman Allen Koranda told MortgageWire. ".... There is no one lined up to fill the position right now." Mr. Koranda said he expects that there will be "a number of very well qualified candidates." The Wall Street Journal has reported that Mark Brickell is a candidate to succeed Mr. Pollock, who is leaving at the end of June to become a resident fellow at a Washington think tank. President Bush nominated Mr. Brickell to be the director of the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, which supervises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but later withdrew his nomination. The Chicago bank plans to make a management succession announcement on June 30, and it will essentially be an interim appointment, the chairman said. Mr. Koranda is the chief executive of Mid America Bank FSB, Clarendon Hills, Ill.

Countrywide Financial Corp., Calabasas, Calif., surpassed $700 billion in mortgage servicing rights for the first time in May.At the end of May, Countrywide serviced $707 billion of home loans, up 32% from a year earlier, the company said in its monthly business report. Company president and chief operating officer Stanford Kurland said Countrywide has been adding servicing rights to its books at a pace of $600 million a day since the beginning of this year.

IndyMac Bancorp Inc., Pasadena, Calif., has priced an offering of 3.2 million shares of common stock at $31.75 per share.The gross proceeds of the offering totaled $101.6 million, IndyMac said. The company has granted the underwriters a 30-day option to buy up to 480,000 additional shares to cover any overallotments. Lehman Brothers was the sole book-running manager of the offering, and Morgan Stanley acted as co-manager. IndyMac can be found online at http://www.indymacbank.com.

Aether Systems Inc., Owings Mills, Md., has hired FBR Investment Management Inc. to assist it in assembling and managing a leveraged portfolio of mortgage-backed securities.Aether said the move is "part of an evolving strategy initially designed to increase the yield on its excess cash balances and ultimately representing what could become a more significant business activity for Aether in the future." Aether plans to invest up to $75 million of its current cash and to leverage this amount between five and eight times to assemble an initial portfolio of $450 million to $675 million in value. The company can be found online at http://www.aethersystems.com.

Prepayment rates for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage-backed securities plunged among major coupons during the May reporting period, according to the Bear Stearns Prepayment Commentary.The constant prepayment rates of Fannie Mae 5.5% coupons fell the most in absolute terms, by as much as 15 CPR, Bear Stearns analysts Dale Westhoff and Bruce Kramer reported. The analysts said the speeds of "moderately seasoned" 5.5s are likely to continue slowing and may drop as much as another 20 CPR by the fall. They also said the slowdown points to important differences in the behavior of agency MBS speeds compared with those of last year. "Clearly, there will be no repeat of last summer's protracted refinancing event that resulted from mortgage pipeline delays," Mr. Westhoff and Mr. Kramer said. Forecasting convergence in agency prepayments, the analysts said the MBS market's refinancing exposure is "the weakest it has been since the fourth quarter of 2000, with less than 25% of the borrower universe having any incentive to refinance at all." Bear Stearns can be found online at http://www.bearstearns.com.

Mortgage lenders added 5,200 full-time employees to their payrolls in April, according to the May employment report released June 4 by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.The BLS report shows that jobs in the mortgage banking/broker sector rose from 444,700 in March to 448,900 in April. (There is a one-month lag in BLS's reporting of mortgage sector employment data.) Mortgage rates averaged 5.81% in April and demand for purchase mortgages was at record levels. The June 4 jobs report shows that the economy generated 248,000 new jobs in May and the unemployment rate remained at 5.6%. "Employment in financial activities rose by 15,000 in May, reflecting continued increases in real estate and in credit intermediation," the BLS said. The BLS can be found online at http://stats.bls.gov.

ServiceLink LP, a Pittsburgh-based closing management company, has announced the formation of AssetLink LP as an independent subsidiary to focus on the sale of bank-owned properties acquired through mortgage foreclosures.AssetLink will operate as a community of brokers, lawyers, and other mortgage default service providers managing every level of the real-estate-owned process, ServiceLink said. Ken Westfall, a 25-year veteran of the industry, has been named president of AssetLink. The new company is seeking brokers and attorneys nationwide to provide services from their current locations via an Internet-based platform.

Colonial Savings FA, Fort Worth, Texas, was among 10 companies (not 27) to be inducted into Freddie Mac's Hall of Fame earlier this year for achieving Tier One servicing status four years in a row. There were 27 single-family mortgage servicers that achieved Tier One status from Freddie Mac for superior investor reporting and default management in two or more quarters of 2003.