Situs, American Mortgage Consultants to Merge

Nick Rudenstine, current President of Situs Group Holdings Corp. & future Co-CEO of SitusAMC. Image courtesy of Situs Group Holdings Corp.

Situs Group Holdings Corp. and American Mortgage Consultants Inc. are planning to merge and rebrand as SitusAMC, a combined services and technology firm that will provide unified solutions to commercial and residential real estate lenders and investors across the globe.

Once the deal closes, possibly by the end of June, the combined company will have more than $175 billion in commercial assets under management and provide fair value assessments on more than $290 billion in commercial real estate assets quarterly. The firm will cover approximately 60 percent of the secondary market private label securitization transactions in the residential market. The merged company will have more than 3,300 professionals operating in 27 markets across the U.S., Europe and India.

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SitusAMC will be led by Nick Rudenstine and Michael Franco as co-CEOs. Rudenstine is currently president of Situs and Franco is the AMC CEO. Situs CEO Steve Powel will become executive chairman of SitusAMC.

Steve Powel, current CEO of Situs Group Holdings Corp. & future Co-CEO of SitusAMC. Image courtesy of Situs Group Holdings Corp.

“This merger will uniquely position us to support our clients across both their commercial and residential debt and equity activities and will create new opportunities to advance their agendas and transform their business through industry-leading services and innovative technologies,” Powel told Commercial Property Executive.

Powel said the idea of matching two companies that can provide both residential and commercial debt life cycle support had never been done on any scale. Merging the firms will help expand their industry-leading service sets and accelerate the development and deployment of innovative technologies to clients including domestic and international banks, private equity investors, pension funds, secondary market guarantors, non-bank mortgage originators and servicers and other participants in the real estate finance industry.

The expanded offerings will include: strategy and advisory services; due diligence and underwriting; servicing and asset management; claims management; valuations; MSR and whole loan brokerage and talent solutions. The firm’s technology solutions will encompass warehouse management, conduit management, collateral management, document management, OCR, indexing, data extraction, portfolio management, remittance reconciliation, work flow due diligence and underwriting support.

Growing companies

Before announcing the merger and formation of SitusAMC, both companies have been separately growing their businesses in recent years, particularly AMC, which accelerated purchases after private equity firm Stone Point Capital took a majority stake in the company in April 2018. Earlier this month, AMC acquired MBMS Inc., a company that tracks collateral behind resident mortgages and fund mortgage loan warehouses. Other AMC recent deals included the purchases of Meridian Asset Services, String Real Estate Information Services and The Barrent Group, which helped expand its Midwest presence. It also launched TechEssential, a subsidiary, in July 2018.

In January 2015, funds managed by Stone Point Capital also bought a stake in Situs. Early last year, Situs acquired MountainView Financial Solutions, a valuation and brokerage platform.