RoundPoint Mortgage has added three new senior executives to its management team, as it prepares to ramp up its retail operations.
The mortgage subservicer’s board of directors appointed Patrick McEnerney as chief executive officer. McEnerney was a managing director at Deutsche Bank for 14 years before Freedom Mortgage brought him on in August 2020 as executive vice president.
RoundPoint also added a new chief administrative officer, Joseph Gormley, who formerly held senior positions at the department Housing and Urban Development. There, he served as the Federal Housing Administration’s deputy assistant secretary for single-family housing, where he oversaw FHA’s single-family mortgage insurance operations, including origination and servicing policy, information technology strategy and quality control. Prior to his stint at HUD, Gormley was regulatory counsel for the Mortgage Bankers Association.
RoundPoint also hired a veteran of the retail mortgage sector, Scott Bristol, who previously oversaw national mortgage production at Flagstar Bank. Before joining Flagstar Bank, he was president of Prime Lending, where he grew the bank’s retail division from $2 billion to $15 billion in annual volume.
In an interview with HousingWire, McEnerney said the new leadership team was “ideal” for the amount of growth RoundPoint Mortgage envisions. McEnerney explained how RoundPoint is preparing for the drawing down of last year’s historic refinance boom.
“We’ve positioned RoundPoint to be able to do well in a rising-rate or stable-rate environment,” McEnerney said. “But we’re optimistic that there will be adequate refinance activity.”
McEnerney said that with the merger, RoundPoint Mortgage will have 90 retail branches.
Freedom is one of the country’s biggest lenders. According to 2020, HMDA data, it was the third-largest originator in terms of single-family loans issued in 2020. Its origination volume rose 247% to $99.23 billion last year, nearly all of it from refinancings. Freedom issued 366,928 refi loans last year, worth $92.9 billion. It trailed only Rocket Mortgage and United Wholesale Mortgage on the refi leaderboard.
Freedom, the top FHA and VA lender in America, closed on its acquisition of RoundPoint last year, in a deal that increased the New Jersey-based lender’s combined owned and subserviced mortgage servicing rights portfolio to $310 billion of unpaid mortgage balance.
It wasn’t an entirely harmonious courtship. RoundPoint sued Freedom Mortgage when it tried to back out of the transaction over a credit facility RoundPoint took out in 2018. Freedom countersued and the two companies voluntarily settled the matter.
In recent years, RoundPoint has shifted its business substantially from owning mortgage servicing rights to being primarily a subservicer, which would insulate the company against the risk of mortgage defaults in the coming months as COVID-19 mortgage forbearance options expire.
Mortgage servicers typically become responsible for collecting payments and remitting the payment to investors. If the underlying borrower is not making payments — as is the case with borrowers in forbearance — servicers can be on the hook to investors.
Mortgage subservicers assume the same responsibilities for collecting payments, but do not own the mortgage servicing rights, and therefore do not bear as much liability.
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