A new arrival in Santa Barbara's home mortgage ranks, so new it has yet to tack a sign on the door, Angel Oak Home Loans landed in August to "disrupt industry in a positive way," as CEO Steven Schwalb has put it. The lender offers home loans to people who usually have trouble qualifying for mortgages for credit reasons, aka non-qualified mortgages. Parent company Angel Oak Capital, a hedge fund started in 2008 by Mike Fierman and Sreeni Prabhu, recently issued $132.65 million in securities mostly based on non-qualified mortgages, usually abbreviated to non-QM, which "represents the firm’s commitment to revitalizing the non-QM mortgage market, which has been dormant for nearly eight years."
The Atlanta company's home loan division brought in many of the loans in the securities offering, but it also sells its mortgages to banks and government agencies like Fannie Mae, explained Richard Staley, the company's chief production officer. New offices in Houston's Woodlands and Nashville's Cool Springs, as well as Santa Barbara, brings the division's total branches to 16 nationwide. The company's four divisions — retail and wholesale mortgage, equity, investment — amount to about $6 billion in assets, Staley said.
As well as traditional mortgages, the Home Loan division concentrates on loans to people who have declared bankruptcy in the past, are self-employed with tax returns that don't show a profit, or have had a short sale, divorce, or other "event" that has damaged their credit, said Staley. Customers can have "good jobs, money in the bank, and great credit scores," he continued, but still be unable to get a traditional loan. He estimated about 7 million Americans fit that category.