The nation’s federal banking regulator stepped in to close down a bank in New Jersey, and many of the failed firm’s assets couldn’t be unloaded. Meanwhile, a warehouse lender has been getting some pretty bad press lately.
On Friday, Fort Lee Federal Savings Bank was seized and closed by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
“The OCC acted after finding that the institution had experienced substantial dissipation of assets and earnings due to unsafe or unsound practices,” the regulator said. “The OCC also found that the institution incurred losses that depleted its capital, the institution is critically undercapitalized, and there is no reasonable prospect that it will become adequately capitalized without federal assistance.”
The Fort Lee, N.J., bank was founded in December 2000 and employed just 11 people as of Dec. 31, 2011.
Total deposits at the time of Fort Lee’s failure were $51 million. Out of a total of $52 million in assets, $17 million were residential loans and $6 million were commercial mortgages.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was named receiver of the failed bank. Following a secret bidding process, the Alma Bank took over the deposits at a 1.85 percent premium. Alma Bank also acquired $16 million of the bank’s assets — leaving the rest for the FDIC to dispose of later.
The FDIC estimated that its Deposit Insurance Fund will be depleted by around $14 million because of Fort Lee’s demise, the 17th FDIC-insured bank failure so far in 2012.
So far this year, Mortgage Daily has tracked the closing or failure of 31 mortgage-related entities.
eWarehouseOne says on its website that it is “a privately held and independently owned investment firm offering warehouse credit facilities on a commercial credit basis to qualified investment and mortgage companies nationwide.”
The Los Angeles-based company, which says it is 14 years old, claims that it has more than $3 billion in outstanding warehouse receivables.
But all is not well at eWarehouseOne based on a series of recent stories published by National Mortgage News.
The series started with a March 20 story that questions the lender’s level of outstanding commitments and noted, “many of the top warehouse managers that we’ve known for years have never heard of them.” That article was followed by a March 27 story about two sales associates who quit. On March 29 the news publication criticized the lender for poor communication and reported that several lenders it contacted had applied for a warehouse line with eWarehouseOne but never closed on one.
An April 16 story indicated that a division vice president had resigned, his supervisor had stopped returning phone messages and e-mails, and the company had no permanent office space. The latest article, on Thursday, indicated that eWarehouseOne had stopped refunding application fees and deposits.
eWarehouseOne’s president of warehouse lending, Michael Fox, and executive vice president of warehouse lending operations, Tom Reynolds, didn’t immediately respond to Mortgage Daily’s request for information.
