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Fortress Eyeing ResCap/GMAC or BK for the Unit?

Management at Ally Financial Corp. is considering throwing part of its mortgage division into bankruptcy and then executing a sale of most of its “good” assets, investment banking sources said late Thursday.

The talk comes on the heels of a report by Bloomberg that Fortress Investment Group is in negotiations to pay more than $1 billion to acquire some of the assets of GMAC/Residential Capital Corp., the nation's sixth largest residential lender/servicer.

At press time a spokeswoman for Ally declined to comment.

One GMAC production official told ASR sister publication National Mortgage News that employees of the firm have heard the rumor but Ally has given no guidance to its workers, adding that “It's business as usual.”  The official added: “Production's pretty good right now.” 

At yearend GMAC/ResCap serviced $382 billion of home mortgages and had a quarterly production run rate of $18 billion, according to NMN/Quarterly Data Report.

Early this week NMN reported that Ally recently contemplated selling $80 billion of MSRs from GMAC.

Industry advisors note that Ally CEO Michael A. Carpenter has never liked the mortgage business and has been ordered to sell all or part of Ally before the November presidential election.

The U.S. Treasury controls 74% of Ally's stock. Ally is a bank holding company that owns GMAC/ResCap and a profitable auto finance division. The bank this week failed a key stress test on its balance sheet.

The publicly traded Fortress owns part of Nationstar Mortgage, which recently was spun off via an IPO. A few weeks back Nationstar agreed to buy roughly $60 billion of MSRs from Aurora Loan Services, Denver.

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