Flick Mortgage/Mortgage Simple - Wholesale Alt-A/Non-conforming

The Greensboro, NC-based Flick has apparently shut down as of last week. Many readers wrote in with this news. The website of Flick Mortgage Investors at www.flickmortgage.com redirects to the MortgageSimple web site (www.mortgagesimple.com) which has just the following message posted:

Effective 7/20/07 at 3:00pm

Due to continuously deteriorating market conditions Flick Mortgage/MortgageSimple has made the decision to exit the wholesale mortgage lending business

A little digging into the Google cache for the site yields the following "about" snippet:

Flick Mortgage Investors and its affiliate MortgageSimple are national wholesale lenders offering a wide variety of products to mortgage partners and specializing in Alt-A, non-conforming, and Jumbo lending. We are competitive in every market and product space where we do business and welcome the opportunity to prove it to you.

We have been an industry innovator for almost two decades and have grown stronger each year by consistently providing the best service, products, pricing and technology to our lending partners. Our "Vision" loan product offering is so comprehensive that brokers proclaim us to be the only true "one stop shop". A proprietary, web-based technology provides brokers with the ability to quickly search tens of thousands of loan scenarios and easily determine the best option for their customers' needs. By using our true "best-x" pricing and prequalification engine, as well as our other powerful tools, each broker's scenario search provides product and pricing choices that make lending fun again.

The company was run by CEO Jeff Flick, and appeared to operate in a number of SouthEast and MidWest states (CityTownInfo.com lists offices in NC, SC, IL and FL).

On July 18th, someone wrote in to us (with many others reporting similar, regarding the payroll issue):

Flick Mortgage Investors ... is two payrolls behind on paying their employees. Their 6/30 paychecks are still insufficient at the bank, and the 7/15 payroll and expense reimbursement checks have been withheld by the company.

It is rumored (actually, not a rumor, info from a intra-company conference call) that Flick Mortgage Investors is in negotiations to try and sell themselves to The Stanford Group in hopes of gaining an infusion of capital into the business to allow them to continue to operate at a loss through the remainder of this year in hopes of gaining market share. Until (and unless) that infusion of capital comes from The Stanford Group, Flick Mortgage company doesn't have the cash to meet payroll.

The funny thing is that Jeff Flick continues to jet around taking international vacations while this is in process, and while the employees that depend on their checks to buy groceries are left holding worthless paychecks. Company officials are urging everyone to "do the right thing and continue to report to work every day, with a good attitude, so that our customers won't get wind of these problems and will continue to send us business. Unless we get the business, we'll never get out of this shape, so it's in your own best interest to continue to work [unpaid] until we can get through this".

It is also rumored that they looked into bankruptcy filing in Federal Court on May 22, 2007, although the company denies this to their employees.

It appears that the hoped-for buyout did not come. Perhaps some assets might still get sold to make payroll, though we cannot confirm any of the above claims at this time. We are also still lacking detail on the scope of Flick's operations (i.e., max. employees, loan volume), so if you have this or any other further info, please let us know.