NovaStar Financial, a former pimp in the subprime-mortgage game, has reinvented itself. Last August, the Kansas City company bought a business that manages home appraisers.
Appraisal management companies serve as an intermediary between lending institutions and appraisers. They've become more relevant now that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have adopted a new code of conduct that prohibits mortgage brokers from directly hiring appraisers.
That NovaStar stands to benefit from what is ostensibly a reform looks strange to Business Week. The magazine recently published a story noting that "some of the same subprime players that helped inflate the real estate bubble in
the first place" are now being counted on to improve the way the industry functions.
Scott Haslam, the CEO of StreetLinks, the appraisal company NovaStar acquired and rebranded, defends the arrangement. "We have gone through the fire and come out better for it," he told Business Week.
StreetLinks is hiring. Alas, the unit is based in Indianapolis.
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Ethics and Morality are contradictory to their DNA. You should have seen it from the inside. they are corrupt in every sense of the word. The sexual harrasment was flagrant, paying people off to shut them up, blackballing employees who didn't play along with the musical beds game. They went out of their way to make sure that person couldn't get another job in the industry. I just wonder how many communicable diseases they brought home to their spouses.
Lost a lot with this stock...
Yet,
they never took "sub-prime" out of their brand identity like the big banks did. They were the first to go under because they were the first to loose access to capital. Their problems were the canary in a coal mine to what would happen in Wall Street a year later.
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