LA Biz Observed
 
Bio • Email • Archive
Follow Mark on Twitter • 
Hear Mark Lacter on KPCC
 

Ever hear of LoanCity? Me neither. It's a privately held wholesale mortgage lender based in San Jose that stopped funding loans on Tuesday - and the thing is, it's not a subprimer. Borrowers generally have good credit scores (not great but better than subprime), but credit has tightened throughout the mortgage biz and that's putting the squeeze on everybody. "We just didn’t have the capital to withstand the continuing of the credit crunch," LoanCity CEO Rick Soukoulis told Marketbeat. The San Jose-based company closed its five remaining offices this week. The irony, says Soukoulis, is that LoanCity lost a bunch of business last year because it deliberately stayed out of the subprime business. From the San Jose Mercury:

The company did not have enough working capital to adjust to the "warehouse" banks' new requirements, Soukoulis said. Whereas six months ago a warehouse lender bank might have provided LoanCity with 99 percent of the funds to make each mortgage, nowadays the lender might hand over just 98 percent, and LoanCity needed to come up with the balance until that loan was eventually sold on the secondary market. With the volume of business LoanCity had, the increase was too much to handle, Soukoulis said. When it announced Tuesday that it had ceased funding loans, LoanCity had about 1,200 mortgages nationwide that were were in various stages of approval but had not been funded. Those were worth about $350 million, Soukoulis said. The affected customers will be assisted by CMG Mortgage Services, based in San Ramon.
> | More
© 2003-2010   •  About LA Observed  •  Email the editor
Follow LAO
Kevin Roderick blog
1:35 PM Sat | A front-page story in the L.A. Times on the opening of KPCC's new studios in Pasadena says that next up for the NPR station is "a major expansion that its board of trustees hopes will make KPCC the hub of a regional constellation of public radio stations and a major source of news and information in Southern California."
Mark Lacter, LA Biz Observed
2:26 PM Fri | You might recall his being sent off for secretly paying clients to pursue shareholder lawsuits.
Sponsors
Jewish Journal logo
California Wellness Foundation
For information on becoming a sponsor, email the editor.
Sign up for email

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner


Blogads Los Angeles network

Get RSS Feeds
of LA Observed
LA Observed publishes several Real Simple Syndication feeds for easy scanning of headlines. If you wish to subscribe to a feed, most popular RSS readers will do it for you. You can also enter the web address from the XML button below or click on a specific feed. For more help with RSS, try here or here.




Add to Google