Plaza Home Mortgage Completes Sandia Acquisition : Purchase: Buying the Albuquerque firm nearly doubles the size of Plaza’s loan service portfolio but will cost some jobs.

Plaza Home Mortgage Corp. said it has completed its previously announced acquisition of Sandia Mortgage Corp., a privately owned mortgage loan servicing company in Albuquerque, N.M.

The purchase nearly doubles the size of Plaza’s loan servicing portfolio as well as its income from servicing fees, but will result in the loss of an undetermined number of jobs in Orange County as Plaza combines its 40-employee Santa Ana loan servicing office with Sandia’s larger facility in New Mexico.

A mortgage loan servicing operation is a largely clerical one that processes home buyers’ monthly payments for dozens of large lenders, taking a small fee--typically about three-eighths of a percent--from each payment. That is only $3.75 for a $1,000 payment, but it adds up: The fees from the combined $6.5-billion loan servicing portfolios of Sandia and Plaza would generate about $24 million a year.

Publicly traded Plaza purchased all Sandia shares for $6.5 million in cash, up to 600,000 shares of Plaza common stock and the assumption of about $40 million of outstanding Sandia liabilities.

The exact amount of Plaza stock to be issued to Sandia’s owners is subject to change later this year when Sandia’s annual financial performance numbers are tallied. At Monday’s closing price of $8.63 a share, however, the maximum of 600,000 shares would be worth almost $5.2 million--boosting the value of the non-debt portion of the deal to $11.7 million.

Plaza acquired Sandia’s $3.3-billion residential loan servicing portfolio and other assets including its Albuquerque loan servicing facility, which has 70 employees.

Some of Plaza’s loan servicing department employees will transfer to New Mexico and others will shift to other departments at Plaza’s headquarters in Santa Ana, said company President James M. Weld. But some job cuts in Orange County are expected, he said.

Since Plaza announced the acquisition on May 24, its stock price has climbed $1 a share on the NASDAQ market, including a 50-cent gain for the day on Monday.

Plaza is a mortgage lender and broker with offices in California, Orgeon, Arizona and Florida. In 1992, the corporation earned $14.5 million on $70.1 million in revenue.