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Santa Ana, CA - April 4, 2005 - The First American Corporation (NYSE: FAF), the nation’s largest data provider, today announced that it has reached agreement to acquire LoanPerformance, a major supplier of advanced analytics and information for the U.S. mortgage finance and servicing market. The transaction is subject to approval of the LoanPerformance shareholders and is expected to close in April. Terms of the transaction, which will be accretive to First American in 2005, were not disclosed.
Based in San Francisco, LoanPerformance is an industry leader in developing mortgage performance and risk analytics used for benchmarking, predictive modeling and market and securities analysis. LoanPerformance has also assembled an exceptional team of quantitative analytics specialists who are also experts on the mortgage industry. The foundation of the company’s analytics is an industry-wide cooperative database of more than 100 million loans contributed by the leading mortgage servicers, securitizers and portfolio lenders in the United States. With its cooperative database as a foundation, and access to First American’s real property information, LoanPerformance is uniquely positioned to create increasingly valuable mortgage credit and prepayment analytics for all segments of the mortgage industry. Parker Kennedy, president and chief executive officer of The First American Corporation said: “The development and use of advanced analytics is a natural progression for information companies. This acquisition accelerates First American’s move into the information analytics arena and helps to maximize the value of our vast property information database assets. This acquisition will also add to our organization a unique combination of talented individuals along with the robust data assets that LoanPerformance manages on behalf of its customers. We plan to extend these powerful analytics capabilities to every dimension of our business, and we expect that strategy will lead to the creation of the next generation of products for compressing the lending process, lowering costs and increasing both value and quality for our customers.”
In addition to its state-of-the-art advanced mortgage analytics capabilities, LoanPerformance brings First American customers that include government sponsored entities, ratings agencies, mortgage-backed securities investors and major Wall Street investment banks, as well as the country’s largest mortgage lenders and servicers. LoanPerformance also offers First American exciting new products like PreTell, which is an advanced mortgage prepayment score that measures the propensity of a borrower to prepay their mortgage.
Dan Feshbach, chief executive officer of LoanPerformance stated: “This business combination gives us greater access to First American’s rich property data, a scaled, world-class technology infrastructure, and affords us the opportunity to substantially enhance the capabilities of our existing products while delivering even more robust and cutting-edge solutions. Our products differ from other analytical models by the fact that they leverage a much wider, deeper and more robust level of information. We are eager to combine our capabilities with the broad array of data, technology and market channel resources of First American.
George Livermore, president of First American Real Estate Solutions, added: “The ability to apply information and analytics together to more precisely understand and predict risk is a top priority of every one of our customers. These new hybrid analytics, as they are adopted and refined, will forever change the way mortgage-market participants do business. As these new analytics are deployed, our customers will gain the ability to more accurately target customers, eliminate fraud, predict and reduce default, and more profitably trade mortgage-backed securities with reliability and transparency.”
Dan Feshbach will continue in his capacity as chief executive officer of LoanPerformance. The LoanPerformance management team will continue to lead the company from its headquarters in San Francisco.
LoanPerformance is a leader in residential mortgage performance data and credit risk decision support tools for mortgage originators, servicers, securities issuers and investors. LoanPerformance’s industry-standard mortgage servicing and securities databases track the delinquency and prepayment performance of 46 million active individual mortgage payments per month and provide loan-level information on over $900 billion in non-agency mortgage and asset-backed securities. LoanPerformance’s proprietary databases and suite of predictive prepayment and risk modeling solutions enable clients to make informed business decisions about credit risk, loss mitigation, customer retention, securitization and investment. For more information visit www.loanperformance.com.
First American RES, a member of The First American Family of Companies, is the nation’s largest provider of advanced property and ownership information, analytics and services. RES’ database covers more than 2,300 counties representing 97 percent of the nation’s real estate transactions. With more than 600,000 users nationwide, RES products are used by companies to improve customer acquisition and retention, detect and prevent fraud, improve mortgage transaction cycle time and cost efficiency, measure the value of residential and commercial properties, identify real estate trends and neighborhood characteristics, track market performance and increase market share. More information about First American RES can be found on the Internet at www.firstamres.com.
The First American Corporation (NYSE: FAF) is a Fortune 500 company that traces its history to 1889. As the nation’s largest data provider, the company supplies businesses and consumers with information resources in connection with the major economic events of people’s lives, such as getting a job; renting an apartment; buying a car, house, boat or airplane; securing a mortgage; opening or buying a business; and planning for retirement. The First American Family of Companies, many of which command leading market share positions in their respective industries, operate within six primary business segments, including: Title Insurance and Services, Specialty Insurance, Mortgage Information, Property Information, Credit Information and Screening Information. With revenues of $6.72 billion in 2004, First American has 31,000 employees in approximately 1,800 offices throughout the United States and abroad. More information about the company and an archive of its press releases can be found at www.firstam.com.
Media contact
David Schulz
The First American Corporation
(714) 800-3298
dschulz@firstam.com
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