Eighteen months after resigning as COO of Countrywide Financial Corp., America’s largest home lender, which played a big role in the subprime mortgage implosion, Stanford Kurland is making it his business to help clean up the mess. After securing investments from two asset managers — BlackRock, which is run by his former first-grade classmate Larry Fink, and hedge fund firm Highfields Capital Management — Kurland, 55, launched Private National Mortgage Acceptance Co., or PennyMac, on March 24 in Calabasas, California, with a team of veterans from Countrywide, which Bank of America agreed in January to acquire. This month Kurland plans to start buying mortgages from lenders, renegotiating those mortgages directly with homeowners, repackaging them into securities and then selling those securities for a profit of about 20 percent. “Most [investors] in distressed mortgages are buying distressed mortgage-backed securities. Our initiative is focused on whole loans, which is a little bit different,” says Kurland.
