Concor Financial’s President Is Ousted; Parent Company Puts Firm Up for Sale

The president of Concor Financial Services has been fired, and the Santa Ana mortgage banking firm has been put up for sale by its financially struggling parent company.

William Seals of Corona del Mar was ousted as president by Concor’s owner, Concordia Federal Bank for Savings, based in the Chicago suburb of Lombard. No specific reasons were given for his removal, and Seals could not be reached for comment.

Concor has been put up for sale because it has grown too big for its parent company, said James Richter, who was installed three weeks ago as Concordia’s president.

If Concor can’t be sold, he said, its operations will be drastically reduced, a move that would affect 130 employees in the Santa Ana headquarters.

“The funding of Concor requires a great deal of money,” he said. “The activity has placed a great deal of strain on the association.”

Richter acknowledged that Seals was upset with S & L executives for wanting to sell all or part of the mortgage company or reduce its activities. But Richter would not elaborate on the reasons for the firing.

Seals founded Concor for the S & L about four years ago and built it into a six-branch operation that has funded $1 billion in home loans since it opened. The firm employs 225 to 250 people.

Besides those in Santa Ana, about 70 employees work in offices in San Diego, Woodland Hills and Danville, Calif. The rest of Concor’s employees work in branches in two Chicago suburbs.

Concordia has run up a deficit of more than $10 million, mainly from losses on construction and commercial loans made in the early 1980s, said Robert Hyland, the S & L’s vice president of marketing.

The sale of Concor Financial, its loan servicing division and its Santa Ana-based escrow subsidiary would lessen the S & L’s negative net worth only slightly, Hyland said.

But it would ease the S&L;’s burden of funding the operation, Richter said.

Concordia, with $575.4 million in assets at the end of June, devotes 5% or more of its assets to providing Concor with money to lend, according to figures Richter and Hyland provided.

That amount is too much for a struggling S & L to put into a subsidiary that is deemed “not as profitable as we had hoped,” Richter said.

Richter, who was named Concor’s chairman, said the S & L will not fill Seals’ position while it pursues a sale of the subsidiary.