New Owners Get Ditech Brand Back on Track with NASCAR Sponsorship

The next time NASCAR driver Kevin Harvick is celebrating a win in victory lane, his fellow Sprint Cup competitors may be grumbling that they "Lost another race to Ditech!"

The new owners of Ditech Mortgage, the consumer direct lender that ruled the subprime-era airwaves with its "Lost another loan to Ditech!" ads, will revive another of its precrisis marketing efforts by sponsoring the NASCAR driver.

The Fort Washington, Pa.-based division of Walter Investment Management Corp. announced a multiyear agreement with Stewart-Haas Racing on Wednesday and will debut as an associate sponsor of Harvick's No. 4 car alongside primary sponsors Budweiser and Jimmy John's during the Sept. 14 race at Chicagoland Speedway. The deal coincides with the first race in NASCAR's 10-race playoff, called the Chase for the Sprint Cup, which Harvick enters with a sixth-place ranking among the 16 drivers eligible to compete for the championship.

Mortgage brands were a common sight on the hoods of racecars during the housing boom. Back when Ditech was the subprime consumer direct division of GMAC, the brand was a NASCAR sponsor for Hendrick Motorsports drivers from 2003 to 2005. GMAC's sponsorship of the Hendrick organization, whose current drivers include Dale Earnhardt Jr. and six-time and reigning Sprint Cup champion Jimmie Johnson, dated back to 1993, and the GMAC brand was last used as a Hendrick sponsor from 2006 to 2007. (Coincidentally, Stewart-Hass Racing buys its racecar chassis and engines from Hendrick Motorsports and the two teams have a technical alliance.)

This isn't the first foray into the mortgage industry for Stewart-Haas Racing or its drivers, either. Quicken Loans sponsored the Stewart-Haas car driven by Ryan Newman for the 2012 and 2013 seasons. This year, Newman brought the consumer-direct online lender's sponsorship with him to his new team, Richard Childress Racing.

Perhaps more memorable to longtime mortgage industry professionals is that Harvick's current teammate, Danica Patrick, was sponsored by now-defunct Argent Mortgage in the early stages of her professional open-wheel racing career. Argent made Patrick the face of its campaign to move up into Alt-A originations, with ads featuring the driver frequently appeared in National Mortgage News, its sister publications and other media.

The Ditech name had fallen by the wayside as a result of GMAC-ResCap-Ally Financial mortgage crisis fallout. But the brand was one of the properties Walter Investment acquired from Ally in March 2013. Since then, it's been ramping up a relaunch of the name.

Side note: If anybody's wondering what ever happened to Ron Michaelson, aka "Ned the Banker" from the old Ditech ads, the actor recently made a mortgage industry comeback of his own, appearing in a CashCall Mortgage commercial playing characters no doubt inspired by the Ned character.