Loan Servicing Bringing Back Sunshine for Shearson Lehman Mortgage

Although mortgage lending activity has flattened a bit as interest rates rose earlier this year, Shearson Lehman Mortgage Co. knows the picture will get brighter.

“We’re waiting for the sun to shine again,” said Walter P. Blass, chairman of the Newport Beach-based firm. “It always has and it will again.”

Blass sounds casual when he says that, but his nonchalance conceals a hard-driving executive who has pulled the one-time regional mortgage company out of chaos and molded it into a national force in the mortgage field.

And with the 41-year-old mortgage banker in command, the subsidiary of the Shearson Lehman Bros. financial services company in New York isn’t sitting on its corporate behind while it weathers the latest storm.

Instead, it is flooding the nation with advertisements offering home equity lines of credit to affluent borrowers at the going prime rate, and it is scouring the countryside looking to buy all the loans and loan-servicing rights it can from other lenders.

Additionally, Shearson Lehman Mortgage expects to lend $1.6 billion this year from its 40 branches in 11 states. That would make it one of the biggest firms in the highly competitive field, but it still would have only a small piece of the market.

The nation’s largest mortgage lender, New York-based Citicorp, funded $13 billion in home loans last year--and that was only 3% of the record $442 billion in mortgages made by the industry.

A product that Shearson Lehman Mortgage hopes will push it further to the forefront of the industry is its prime-only revolving line of credit. The prime rate is the benchmark interest rate, set by the nation’s major banks, and most loans carry rates that are higher than prime.

The Shearson prime rate line of credit is secured by the equity in a borrower’s home. Nearly all of Shearson Lehman Mortgage’s competitors in marketing prime-only credit lines, Blass said, comes from banks and savings institutions, not from other mortgage companies.

Shearson Lehman’s program generates $22 million a month in new loan business for the company, and Blass said he expects that to grow to as much as $40 million a month next year.

“My goal is to be the largest home equity (line of credit) lender in the United States,” he said.

To expand beyond the confines of the branch offices, Blass is pushing what he calls “user friendly” loan applications--easy-to-read forms that can be mailed to customers. With toll-free telephone lines also available, customers looking for $50,000 to $1 million lines of credit never have to appear at a Shearson Lehman Mortgage office, he said.

So far, the average line of credit taken out is $120,000, and the average amount actually borrowed is $90,000, he said.

But making loans is not what fills the coffers at Shearson Lehman. It’s servicing loans, sending out bills and collecting the money--for a fee--that has provided the mortgage company with as much as 85% of its total revenue.

“Servicing is good steady business,” said Perrin Long, an analyst with Lipper Analytical Securities in New York. “It is simple, not exciting; there’s no sex appeal, but somebody’s got to collect it. And you make good money at it,” he said.

Shearson Lehman Mortgage probably makes more money at it than most servicers. Its finely tuned computer system in San Bernardino, run by Richard Galleher, allows the company to service about 900 loans per employee, well above the industry average of 550, according to Blass and industry sources.

This year, Shearson Lehman Mortgage will more than double its loan servicing, handling $12.2 billion--mostly under contract with other lenders.

The loan-servicing division should raise $50 million to $60 million in revenue for the mortgage company, Blass predicted, and should provide about 60% of the $99 million in total revenue expected this year.

The division has also begun a new “master servicing” operation, overseeing the collection efforts of other loan-servicing firms and guaranteeing investors that it will step in and continue collecting and forwarding borrowers’ payments if those firms go out of business. The operation is expected to generate $5 million to $10 million in revenue this year, Blass said.

The new product and increased marketing activity have catapulted the Shearson Lehman Mortgage servicing division from an also-ran to an industry leader in just 18 months.

And Blass said he’s not satisfied yet. He is looking to buy even more loans and servicing rights from other lenders.

“We’re going to play trump, and we’ve got a long suit,” Blass said.

The front-runner, again, is Citicorp, which serviced $38 billion in loans last year, more than five times Shearson Lehman’s total.

In his quest for higher profits, Blass and his top managers also have created a division that acts as middleman in the complex world of mortgage brokering.

The company’s “conduit” division agrees to buy packages of loans from banks and savings institutions at discounts and then repackages them into bigger bundles and re-sells them to investors while retaining the servicing rights. The company makes some profit in the buying and selling, but its revenue comes primarily from the fees it gets for servicing the loans.

When Blass took over the reins of Shearson Lehman Mortgage in February, 1985, he found a company that insiders said was lethargic and in disarray.

“The company needed to focus in a very intense way on a few things that it could do well,” Blass said. “Also, the company was battered pretty hard like other real estate-oriented companies were in the early 1980s. We had bought at the peaks and sold in the valleys.”

So, most of his early days at the firm were spent cleaning up the company’s assets and cleaning out sluggish operations.

“We lost some good people,” Blass said. “I’m not happy about that, but I did what I had to do to position the company to grow. . . . Actually, the growth will take care of itself. Our goal is to be extremely well-managed and profitable.”

Today, Shearson Lehman Mortgage is doing “quite well,” analyst Perrin said.

The parent company does not break out earning statistics for its subsidiaries, and Blass would not reveal the firm’s net income.

In the past year, the company has more than doubled its staff--to 900 from 400--and its retail offices--to 40 from 19.

The numbers were even higher before last spring’s interest rate increases combined with the traditional seasonal slowdown in home buying and the economic uncertainty that followed the Oct. 19 stock market crash to create a “very flat” mortgage market, Blass said.

But since April, the company has shut down 10 of its offices and eliminated 200 positions.

Now, it plans to add staff when it opens new offices in San Jose and Washington, Blass said.

And amid all his product planning and marketing development, Blass has one nagging concern as he tries to build an image with Shearson Lehman Mortgage’s new-found retail customers.

The company has had four names in its 41-year existence--three in the past 14 years.

Now, a fifth may be on the way.

Frank Whitelock started the firm in San Bernardino in 1946 as Southern California Mortgage & Loan Corp.

His grandson, Frank O’Bryan, renamed the company Western Pacific Financial Corp. in 1973 and moved it to Newport Beach a few years later. O’Bryan sold the company to the Shearson Hayden Stone brokerage house for $16 million in 1979, just before Shearson merged with American Express and changed its name a third time--to Shearson/American Express Mortgage Co.

Then, in 1986, American Express spun off 40% of Shearson Lehman Bros., precipitating the latest name change to Shearson Lehman Mortgage Co.

And since E .F. Hutton and Shearson Lehman Bros. began merger talks Monday, the prospect of another name change looms.

“I certainly wouldn’t want to change my name every two years or so,” Blass said. “Going forward with stability means something.”