Pepper Australia has picked up its act and is performing well, adding close to $500 million of loans to its non-conforming portfolio last year.
Pepper had slightly less than $3 billion in residential mortgages in Australia at the end of January. Of that, $1.53 billion is non-conforming and sub-prime loans, while the balance of $1.46 billion is prime loans, according to a Standard & Poor's evaluation published last week.
Pepper's non-conforming lending business hit a peak in late 2007, when its portfolio was worth around $1.5 billion, but like other non-conforming lenders, it could not get funding during the financial crisis and the value of its portfolio fell to around $500 million by mid-2011, reports Banking Day.
In May of that year, Pepper acquired $5 billion of prime and non-conforming loans in Australia and New Zealand from GE Capital, and by the end of last year had regained its pre-GFC high.
On 10 January Pepper exercised its eighth call option to fully repay investors holding the $108.5 million notes outstanding on its Pepper Residential Securities Trust No. 8, issued in December 2010.
Co-group chief executive officer Patrick Tuttle said this demonstrated the group’s ongoing commitment to satisfy the intended refinancing obligations of all its RMBS transactions.
Pepper launched its first prime mortgage product, Pepper Essential, at the end of January.
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