Subprime defaults close mortgage firm [North Jersey]
Bergen County mortgage banker David Sadek was riding high a year and a half ago, serving sushi and shish kebab to investment-banking clients aboard his yacht A Loan at Sea.
His firm, founded in 1991, was on track to achieve a company record of $1 billion in annual loan sales. Home prices were rising, and the investment bankers who bundle loans together and resell them as securities to spread the risk were eager to buy loans and provide First Financial Equities and other companies like it with a steady stream of funds to make more loans, even to people with shaky credit histories and high debt levels.
It was “a good time to be in the mortgage business,” he told The Record in an interview.
But in the second half of 2006, the business went quickly downhill.