Servicer Hiring

Litton Loan Servicing plans to hire about 80 to 130 call center and servicing employees within the next year, President and Chief Executive Larry Litton Jr. told MortgageDaily.com. The additions will push staff to 250 to 300 in the Peach State.

The new employees will join another 170 workers who will be transferred from Atlanta to a new building Litton constructed in McDonough, Ga., which will also serve as a disaster recovery center. The company intends to begin occupying the new facility by September.

“The move to McDonough is still local enough,” Litton said. “We did a lot of work on where our employees live, and where you can grow, and we felt that part of Atlanta seemed to be a great area to move to. There wasn’t a whole lot of other call center jobs there to compete with.”

The new facility’s capacity is 700, but there are no plans to fulfill it in the short term, as staff will be added gradually as needed, the CEO added.

Litton’s presence in Georgia began with an Atlanta facility it purchased almost three years ago when it acquired a loan portfolio from Provident Bank, Litton said. Previously a call center only with about 100 employees, Litton integrated other servicing functions in Atlanta, including bankruptcy, loan administration, and loss mitigation services.

At its Houston headquarters, the servicer has about 1,200 employees and sees this number staying flat for the year, despite that foreclosure work is handled in this facility. Litton currently does not have plans to add foreclosure staff in Atlanta either.

“Our portfolio’s experienced the same trends that the rest of the market has,” the CEO explained. “We’ve had about a 27 percent increase in our call center staff over the last 12 months and that’s been kind of in preparation for this market, making sure that we maintain capacity.”

Litton, which is owned by C-BASS, said it wants to preserve the path of buying distressed portfolios. The company’s specialty is curing delinquent loans and preventing foreclosures.

As of second quarter’s end, Litton serviced $57 billion of mortgage product or about 370,000 loans, the executive said.

C-BASS, or Credit-Based Asset Servicing and Securitization LLC, is owned by private mortgage insurer MGIC and will reportedly be buying Fieldstone Investment Corp. in deal expected to close shortly.