Subprimers find new work

It's hardly news that many of the mortgage brokers who handled those questionable subprime loans a few years ago are back working the other side of the game: namely, offering help, for a fee, of course, in modifying their bum mortgages. What's amazing is how upfront these people are about what they do. Jack Soussana works for a loan modification company in the same downtown L.A. address that he used to broker mortgages. From the NYT:

"We just changed the script and changed the product we were selling," said Mr. Soussana, who ran the Los Angeles sales office of Federal Loan Modification Law Center. The new script: You got a raw deal, and "Now, we're able to help you out because we understand your lender." Mr. Soussana's partners at FedMod, as the company is known, were also products of the formerly lucrative world of high-risk lending. The managing partner, Nabile Anz, known as Bill, previously co-owned Mortgage Link, a California subprime lender, now defunct, that once sold $30 million worth of loans a month.

Jeffrey Broughton, one of FedMod's initial partners, served as director of business development at Pacific First Mortgage, a lender that extended so-called Alt-A mortgages for borrowers with tarnished credit for Countrywide Financial, which lost billions of dollars on bad mortgages before being rescued in an acquisition. FedMod is but one example of how many of the same people who dispensed risky mortgages during the real estate bubble have reconstituted themselves into a new industry focused on selling loan modifications.