Newcastle Investment Corp., a mortgage investing REIT managed by Fortress Investment Group, is “very optimistic” it will participate in a big investment in mortgage servicing rights with other entities that its manager oversees, chairman Wesley Edens said.
Bloomberg reported that Newcastle is working on a possible transaction that Edens called “quite” large.
Sources told ASR sister publication National Mortgage News (NMN) that the deal in question is believed to be Nationstar’s purchase of Residential Capital Corp. Nationstar is owned, in part, by Fortress.
Fortress, Nationstar, and New Castle are all publicly traded.
It is expected that New Castle will invest in “excess” servicing rights that will be created once the sale occurs.
Investment bankers say Nationstar hopes to buy ResCap through a prepackaged bankruptcy transaction that could be announced as early as this weekend.
The government-owned Ally Financial owns ResCap, which also uses the trade name GMAC Mortgage.
According to figures compiled by NMN and the Quarterly Data Report, ResCap services $382 billion of home mortgages, ranking fifth nationwide.
