REAL ESTATE : FarWest Residential Changes Name to Frontline Mortgage

What’s in a name?

Not much when it’s a name connected with a failed business.

At least that’s the thinking of the owners of FarWest Residential, a mortgage company once owned by FarWest Savings & Loan Assn.

FarWest S&L; was declared insolvent and seized by federal regulators last week, and now FarWest Residential says it will be called Frontline Mortgage Co.

Cliff Piscitelli, the mortgage company’s president, and Wendell C. Shirk, its executive vice president, bought FarWest--now Frontline--from FarWest Savings in December, 1989.

While the name change comes more than a year after Frontline was acquired from FarWest Savings and only six days after the S&L; was seized, Piscitelli said it has been planned for a long time as part “of the natural transition.”

A mortgage firm such as Frontline originates loans but then bundles them into huge packages and sells them to institutional investors. It makes money “servicing” the loans, chiefly by collecting monthly mortgage payments from individual homeowners and forwarding them to the investors--minus a service fee.

The company said it now services a loan portfolio worth about $1.5 billion.