Empty for years, the 200-year-old stone building at the corner of Strand and Hill in Frederiksted is rebuilt and now houses Ocwen Mortgage Servicing and Altisource Asset Management Corporation; two new V.I. Economic Development Commission tax beneficiaries planning to hire 70-plus employees.
Executives of the two affiliated companies joined with Economic Development Authority and EDC officials Tuesday evening for a gala opening ceremony in the newly renovated historic building, with its distinctive wide blocks of white limestone offset by three diamond-shaped inlays of yellow stone. Now that it has been fully restored, it serves as a visual bookend, an architectural mirror-image of the Richards and Ayer Realty building across the street.
"These companies, they are almost the epitome of what an EDC company should be," Labor Commissioner Albert Bryan, a member of the EDA governing board, said at Tuesday’s gathering.
The companies are large, firmly established, and publicly traded, Bryan said, adding, “They are going to be hiring more than 50 employees." Ocwen is the eighth largest mortgage company in the world and its affiliate, Altisource, handles the rentals of large numbers of homes, he said.
The companies plan to have a main office, with 10 to 20 employees, on Strand Street, and have leased space at the William D. Roebuck Industrial Park, where they plan to build a call center to service mortgages, with another 50 employees, Bryan said.
"It’s a call center, but not a sales call center like people think of. These are good jobs, with typical salaries about $35,000," Bryan said.
"Ocwen, I think, is heralding the new economy to St. Croix as we switch from an industrial to a service-based economy," Bryan said, adding that this is “proof we can attract new businesses."
According to Ocwen’s executive vice president and general counsel, Paul Koches, "It quickly became apparent St. Croix was the best choice" as the company looked around for locations for its servicing center.
The tax benefits were an important factor as well as an available workforce, he said.
The second company, Altisource, is a strategic ally that Ocwen spun off in 2009 to handle its technical and analytic assets, Koches said. Both are publicly traded – Ocwen on the New York Stock Exchange, and Altisource on the NASDAQ exchange, he said.
For 25 years, Ocwen was in the business of turning around nonperforming mortgage loans, Koches said. The founders "had a notion they could make a business by working to make them performing loans rather than slamming them into foreclosure as quickly as possible," Koches said.
"We have done over 350,000 loan modifications,” he said, noting that’s more than a million people. “And we did all that without one penny of TARP funds, I’m very proud to say," Koches said.
An Altisource asset management spinoff is planned as a separate, publicly-traded company, he said, which will handle loans on single family homes used for rental properties. He said that 52 percent of all rental properties are single family houses.
With the company poised for growth on a nationwide basis, the call centers should be in high demand and poised for growth too, Koches said. The Strand Street office will be hiring 10 to 20 employees almost right away, he said, adding that if permits can be “acquired quickly," the call center will open " in a year or two," then hiring and training 50 more employees.
