In a year that saw the termination of their CEO and the eventual sale of their company, over 150 former team members of Civic Financial Services were on hand to launch a new business-purpose lender two weeks ago.
Los Angeles-based CV3 Financial Services, which specializes in investor lending for fix-and-flip and rental purchases, celebrated its grand opening on Aug. 31, a little more than seven months after its former parent, PacWest Bancorp, first announced a major restructuring of Civic, which included the termination of its then-CEO William Tessar.
Originally founded in 2014 through a partnership between Wedgewood and one of its subsidiaries, Civic Financial was later acquired by PacWest in 2021 during the mortgage boom and has come in at or near the top of the list of National Mortgage News' best companies to work for two years running. The name of the new company represents the third incarnation of its team, according to Tessar.
"The way I think about CV3, it's our core group, version three, and there are no legacy issues. You have lessons learned and let's be clear, we will thrive again," Tessar said in an interview with National Mortgage News.
"It's not a startup. It's a restart of something that was incredibly special in the marketplace and I think our customers will be the judge of that."
As PacWest sought to reduce costs and improve its capital position after announcing its initial plans for Civic Financial in January, the Beverly Hills, California-based bank laid off hundreds of the lender's employees. Later, the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank spurred concerns about the stability of similar regional financial institutions, precipitating a run on PacWest deposits.
Although it debuts only a few months after the selloff of Civic Financial, the development for CV3 was laid well before the events of 2023 and went through several twists and turns, Tessar said. The company is also coming to market during one of the most challenging periods for lenders in recent history.
Tessar spoke to National Mortgage News the day after CV3's launch to discuss the path taken toward creating a new company and its strategy amid today's lending headwinds.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Can you give us a rundown of your impressions about what happened earlier this year?
The partnership with the bank was incredible. The bank ran into real balance sheet issues, which you now know of.
They approached me in the middle of '22 asking if I could raise capital and spin Civic out from PacWest. Now if you think about it, in the middle of '22, the whole regional crisis had not started, but balance sheets in the industry were starting to show themselves, and they were not devoid of that problem. So I put capital partners together and entered into an LOI [letter of intent] to spin Civic out of PacWest which was signed at the end of '22. Those terms, which were to be signed at the end of January in the form of a definitive agreement, hit a rocky patch where the bank's position was unable to do their part of what we had agreed on, and we were unwilling to navigate through those changes in our discussions.
We reached an impasse in those talks which led to my termination. Ultimately, three days later, it led to the beginning of the wind down of Civic, and it didn't happen overnight. This was never a restructure; it was a wind down.
They wound it down to the very end, where they sold the name and marketing materials and then did a final RIF [reduction in force] of the group while calling it Civic, but Civic the licensed entity that originated loans was closed down, and that created the genesis for CV3.
It sounds like you had the groundwork laid out to eventually to spin off or start a company. Did the process begin immediately in February after you were terminated from PacWest? Or did it start in May?
Once it was clear after the first RIF and 200 and some odd people were fired, and you can see that this was definitely a shutdown, that's when my mind started going that way. It wasn't immediate.
These people and myself have been together — some for 25 years. It's like watching your children suffer, and so they went through a series of reductions in workforces and wind down of leases, as the bank was figuring out whatever they had to figure out. Civic was a small piece of a very, very big company.
I did know I wasn't done. I did know that wasn't going to be my final act. And I did know that I wanted to work with the folks who I had spent my life with in this space. I think once PacWest had pulled the trigger on a couple of key items related to the wind down of the business, that's when things really got going in my mind.
How did that make you feel personally, knowing that you have over 100 people waiting for you to launch and start all over again?
I'd say anxious while we were building it because you can't build it quick enough. Your responsibility goes well beyond yourself, right? That's a tremendous amount on one's shoulders, but what I would tell you is it wasn't by myself. All of these folks have worked around the clock to make this what it is and, and we're excited.
You're licensed in 21 states currently. How does that compare to what Civic had at the end of 2022?
If you think about our approach, we want it to come out the gate in the states we did the most transactions, had the most past relationships with — that we were most familiar with, both from a valuation and asset management perspective. I think that it represents over 90% of the loans we've done in the past, those states right there. But already, after 24 hours we have four state requests from originators that want to add, so our licensing department is going to be busy.
You have a retail and a wholesale channel. We have experience in correspondent, but we didn't come out the gate with it. We've had experience in small-balance multi, but we didn't come out of the gate with it.
We've done 20,000 loans and over $10 billion in fundings. That's given us a lot of insight from a product perspective, from a geo perspective, from a channel perspective. And we just took all that experience and channeled it in a real focused step-one, day-one approach to the market.
It's a tough market out there for residential lending, and also in the investor space you’re in. It's not an easy time to start or restart a business. How do you approach the market?
I've never seen it as bad on the conventional side as I've recently seen it, and so a lot of those companies are having a tough go of it. The strong companies are surviving, but you're seeing a lot of pain there. I think it's apples and oranges in terms of lending channels.
There is still a tremendous amount of dinged-up real estate across the nation. There's still a real need and demand for this type of product, and I look at very long, wide runways and green pastures in terms of our future.
In the last three years — if you want to forecast fear for a second — we just lived through a once-in-a-generation thing called COVID. We managed to thrive through COVID. Then, you think about the interest-rate rise. It's the fastest increase over the shortest period of time it's ever risen, and we've pivoted during those times as well. I kind of feel like the two big bogeymen have already hit us.
Interest rates are not cooperating currently, but it makes for an exciting market.
If we have a tick up or more in interest rates or maybe a tick down in values or anything else. naysayers would want to throw in the marketplace. I think it pales in comparison to what we just went through.
I actually think it creates some opportunity for us in terms of that whole conventional market. Before, when the conventional people were doing your loan four or five times a year because rates kept dropping, there was no need to talk to BPL originators. But I think right now those conversations are starting to pick up, and they should because this is a product that their client base needs. It serves a really valuable spot in the lending market.
I've probably never been more excited about the marketplace than I am right now, and time will tell how right I am.
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