Home Loan Servicing Solutions – an entity whose sole mission in life is to buy servicing rights from Ocwen Financial Corp. – finally went public this week, raising roughly $186 million in cash.
With the initial proceeds it hopes to buy $16 billion of MSRs from Ocwen for roughly $181 million. HLSS's advisor on the transaction is Mortgage Industry Advisory Corp., New York. Ocwen is based in Atlanta.
According to an updated S-1 statement filed just before the IPO, its eventual goal is to buy roughly $55 billion of subprime and alt-A MSRs from Ocwen. (Its first S-1 was filed a year ago.)
HLSS will have no production capacity – and won't even service its own loans. That task will fall to Ocwen working as a subservicer – the firm selling it MSRs.
The Cayman-based company was created by top executives at Ocwen, including chairman Bill Erbey who pledged to buy $10 million of HLSS' stock.
Earlier in the week the shares were priced at $14 a piece but have mostly traded below that.
Because it is based in the Cayman Islands, HLSS will pay no corporate income tax.
A large chunk of Ocwen's back office workforce is located in India where it pays those workers a fraction of their U.S. equivalents.
