Press Releases
The Barrent Group Announces New Service Offering for Residential Mortgage-Backed Security Bondholders
Urbandale, IA (July 14, 2009) –The Barrent Group announces the launch of an innovative approach to help bondholders recover money lost as a result of buying into pools of residential mortgage-backed securities.
The Barrent Group’s primary business is to assist investors in residential mortgage-backed securities, by helping them exercise their recourse rights against mortgage lenders who failed to adhere to prudent underwriting practices. The amount of money involved is huge. Residential mortgage-backed securities could generate as much as $375 billion in additional losses for financial institutions, according to research by Standard & Poor’s.
“Bondholders have difficulty identifying other investors to join with them to meet the minimum percentage requirements necessary to gain access to loan files,” said Richard Barrent, President and Chief Operating Officer of The Barrent Group. “This has been a monumental stumbling block. Without access to the information contained in the loan files, it can be problematic for investors to identify flawed underwriting practices or fraud and to thereby exercise their recourse rights.”
Typically, access to loan files requires a formal request by bondholders owning a minimum of 25% of the dollar value of a residential mortgage-backed security pool. Since many of the pools are comprised of several hundred million dollars of mortgages and have numerous bondholders, it is often necessary to identify and match up multiple bondholders of a single securitization trust to gain file access.
The Barrent Group’s Bond Board, located on their secure website, allows bondholders to register their investments in pools with disappointing performance. Bondholders will remain anonymous until they provide written permission to The Barrent Group to share their identity with others. As further protection to assure anonymity, investors may choose to register their holdings in the name of a nominee.
After a bondholder registers its residential mortgage-backed security holdings, they will be advised when other bondholders have registered holdings in the same pool. That will facilitate the creation of bondholder alliances, for the purpose of gaining access to loan files.
The Barrent Group was founded in 2008 by Richard Barrent, a former executive with Wells Fargo Home Mortgage and Richard Levitt, a retired Vice Chairman of Wells Fargo & Company. Mr. Levitt’s family founded Dial Finance, the company that evolved into Wells Fargo Financial. Mr. Levitt said he “believes by identifying flawed underwriting decisions and ethical miscues by lenders and holding them accountable, our economy will work better in the long run.” The Barrent Group is based in Urbandale, Iowa.
For more information, please visit www.BarrentGroup.com.
Contact:
Richard Barrent
President and Chief Operating Officer
866-318-4448 Extension 250