While many issuers have avoided the high loan-to-value market following last year's liquidity crisis, Minneapolis-based General Motors Acceptance Corp.-Residential Funding Corp. has stood their ground, emerging as one of the most powerful and dedicated players in the business.
With the goal of completing an ambitious $2 billion of high loan-to-value securitization for 1999 - and increasing that amount even further after the millennium - the company last week completed a $560 million offering and expects to issue another high-LTV transaction between $600 million and $650 million before year-end, company officials say.
Jeff Detwiler, GMAC-RFC's managing director for the securitization business, said that his group expects to continue issuing high-LTV securitizations quarterly and is "on target" to achieve its goal of issuing a total $2 billion of the securities by the end of the year. The timing and size of the fourth-quarter deal will depend on how the market responds to year-end issues, such as Y2K, he explained.
"With the big fallout in the finance industry from last year, a lot of the other players were brought down, and we're one of a handful of players still involved in that market," Detwiler said. "We really stepped up our activity because the marketplace was willing to conform to our guidelines. And we've been getting a very positive response and very well-participated underwritings, because of the consistency of our product and the expected performance."
More than anything else, GMAC-RFC is known for the diversity of its product lines, and it has been a proven leader in the securitization of jumbo and subprime loans, in addition to high LTV transactions.
Detwiler said the company is in the midst of issuing a $1.5 billion subprime securitization, launching later this month. As one of the largest issuers of subprime mortgages this year, GMAC-RFC has completed two similar deals in 1999 totaling $2.3 billion - to bring the 1999 volume to $3.8 billion in subprime securitizations, including the latest one.
"As we continue to work with our business partners, we bring them innovative structures which really provide them with greater economics," Detwiler explained. "We've done a significant amount of work in identifying what loan and borrower attributes correlate to performance. We have a stringent policy, in terms of what we want to buy, and what we don't want to buy. We are disciplined."
