By Michael Corkery | The New York Times
In another sign of the banking industry’s retreat from the mortgage market, Wells Fargo is selling servicing rights on $39 billion of home loans to a nonbanking firm.
Wells Fargo said on Wednesday that it sold the rights to service 184,000 mortgages to the Ocwen Financial Corporation, a rapidly expanding company known for its expertise in dealing with subprime borrowers.
The deal represents about 2 percent of all the mortgages that Wells Fargo services, and comes as other banks have been selling this business to specialty servicers like Ocwen, which is based in Atlanta.
Last week, Citigroup announced that it had transferring servicing rights for 64,000 mortgages to Fannie Mae, which, in turn, plans to pay an outside firm to service the loans.
