Mortgage Scene: Some of the Best Mortgage Firms Keep Quiet About Their Success.(Brief Article)

A day doesn't go by at the mortgage division of Thomson Financial Media (the publisher of this journal) where some firm or their hyperkinetic public relations staff don't come clamoring for attention - as in: "Please write about us, please, please, please."

Yes, some firms measure success by their press clips or how many times their CEOs and SVPs wind up on the front page of the trade press. Other firms measure success by revenue growth or earnings, and then there are those who use some combination of press clips, earnings and revenue with a little bit of stock appreciation thrown in for good luck.

If a mortgage banker/servicer is publicly-traded, chances are they have a PR department that churns out press releases like Stephen King does novels. But what about those privately-held firms that we've all heard about (and some that we haven't yet discovered), that are out there in the hinterlands of the industry, keeping a low profile and doing (what appears to be) quite well?

This month's column will touch on three such firms - mortgage bankers that I've heard about over the years, that have received some "good buzz" because they're doing something right. But first a disclaimer: I've heard about these firms through various industry sources. Most of these companies are publicity shy - so it's impossible to verify how well they're doing. Still, these three have, for better or worse, caught someone's attention. Here they are, listed alphabetically:

* Aegis Mortgage, Houston. Company CEO Rick Thompson sometimes returns telephone calls and sometimes he doesn't. Aegis has methodically and carefully bought bits and pieces of a handful of subprime train wrecks, including Cityscape, UC Lending and most recently, 69 branches from EquiCredit, BoA's once storied subprime unit. It also recently hired Stu Marvin as its chief financial officer. Stu once served as CFO at IMC Mortgage in Tampa. (IMC was a pretty good company until Wall Street got its mitts on it.) Aegis is probably doing at least $1 billion a quarter in mostly nonconforming production. It doesn't answer loan surveys so it's hard to tell.

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