Mortgage firm files to offer stock

A firm that former Countrywide Financial Corp. President Stanford Kurland formed to buy troubled home loans and related securities filed Friday to sell as much as $750 million in stock to the public.

The company, PennyMac Mortgage Investment Trust, is a new unit of the Kurland-led Private National Mortgage Acceptance Corp., which from its founding early last year through March 31 raised $584 million to buy mortgages and had invested $226 million of that amount, according to PennyMac’s regulatory filing.

The new firm would make some of its investments under a federal plan to offer financing to buyers of toxic mortgage assets from banks, the filing says.

Kurland spent almost three decades at Countrywide, which rode the housing boom as the nation’s biggest home lender. The firm avoided collapse by selling itself last year to Bank of America Corp. Kurland left in 2006, when Countrywide was profitable and had a market value of more than $20 billion.

PennyMac Mortgage and Private National Mortgage are based in Calabasas, as was Countrywide.