From the Record:
Paramus lender shuts subsidiaries, cuts jobs
The Paramus-based lending and loan payment collecting arm of a real estate investment trust is trying to shake off a serious bout of the subprime contagion.
Within the past two weeks, Opteum Financial Services LLC, at 115 W. Century Road, a subsidiary of Vero Beach, Fla.-based Opteum Inc., has closed its wholesale and conduit-lending businesses, eliminating 257 jobs while leaving its retail lending business intact. The wholesale business provides funding through loan brokers and the conduit business buys and resells loans from other lenders.
Most of the job cuts were in shuttered lending offices in California and Connecticut, Opteum spokeswoman Elizabeth Chrane said Monday. She said she could not immediately determine the number of jobs eliminated in Paramus, where Opteum Financial employed more than 400 people in 2005.
The unit, founded by Opteum Financial CEO Peter R. Norden — a 1975 graduate of Fairleigh Dickinson University and a former president of the Mortgage Bankers Association of New Jersey — continues to operate its retail-lending business, through which the company makes loans directly to consumers online or over the phone.
Reasons for the loan-office shutdowns included “weakness in consumer demand” and “deterioration in the secondary market for closed mortgage loans,” the company said in an April 20 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
About two-thirds of the loans the company makes are “Alt-A,” which the company defines in its annual report as loans for those who would meet standard Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac underwriting guidelines, but are putting less money down and have less verified income than Fannie or Freddie would allow.
Fewer than 5 percent of the loans Opteum Financial made last year are in the sub-prime category, which is generally for people with Fair Isaac Corp. (FICO) credit scores below 620.
The Record is moving from the offices in Hackensack. The leased property which contains a diner and office buildings is going to be demolished. Don’t know what is going to go there…probably luxury condos. Hackensack is the new Hoboken.
it floods so badly down there near the Record. It would be a mess to put condos there, though you’re probably right, that’s likely what they will do.