Morgan Stanley & Co. last week took a final round of bids on its residential servicing division, Saxon Mortgage, Ft. Worth, Texas, which holds $28 billion of contracts on its books, according to investment banking officials familiar with the situation.
Morgan, which declined to comment, bought Saxon about six years ago during the height of the subprime boom.
The investment banker has been trying to sell Saxon (on and off) for most of the past year with little success to date.
Saxon is a specialty servicer with roughly $18 billion of subprime MSRs on its books, according to figures compiled by National Mortgage News and the Quarterly Data Report.
Ocwen Financial Corp., which recently bought Litton Loan Servicing from Goldman Sachs & Co., has been mentioned as a possible bidder on the firm.
