Guaranteed Rate Acquires Discover Home Loans Call Center

Guaranteed Rate has added 75 former Discover Home Loans employees as well as the Irvine, Calif., call center facility that they worked at.

The move gives Guaranteed Rate a second call center, with the other one located in its headquarters city of Chicago.

Discover Financial Services announced in June that it would exit the mortgage lending business. At that time, it reached an agreement with AmeriSave Mortgage in Atlanta to finish processing all current loan applications. AmeriSave also agreed to open a Louisville, Ky., office and offer jobs to 125 Discover Home Loans employees; that office officially opened Aug. 12.

Riverwoods, Ill.-based Discover entered the mortgage business in June 2012 when it acquired LendingTree Loans, which was also known as Home Loan Center.

As part of the winding down its operations, Discover gave Guaranteed Rate, as well as other mortgage companies, the opportunity to make presentations to its workers about possible employment prospects, said Scott Stephen, the president of the direct-to-consumer online division at Guaranteed Rate.

"They really wanted their people to be well tended to and well cared for and placed in a manner that they thought was best for those people," he said.

Guaranteed Rate sees the deal as a chance to add some very experienced loan officers to its staff, as the average loan officer at the Irvine location has 10 to 12 years of experience. "It was a just very, very talent-rich group of people that had built a nice culture and was available en masse," Stephen said.

A request for comment from Discover was not returned by presstime.