They made risky loans, so where are they now?

Jeff German, Steve Kanigher and Alex Richards

Sunday, Oct. 14, 2007 | 1:28 a.m.

When Gov. Jim Gibbons convened a closed-door summit this month to address the mortgage lending crisis in Nevada, two of Clark County's largest home mortgage lenders, Countrywide Financial Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co., were among the participants.

Conspicuously missing, however, were lenders that devoted the largest share of their portfolios to high-risk subprime loans blamed for much of the upheaval in the Las Vegas Valley's housing market.

Countrywide, which announced up to 12,000 layoffs nationwide amid the lending crisis, issued 7,032 subprime loans in Clark County from 2004 to 2006, the most of any lender, according to a Sun analysis of federal home mortgage records. But Countrywide's subprime lending amounted to only 18.6 percent of its total business here.

Subprime loans made up even less, 6 percent, of Wells Fargo's local loans.

Plenty of other companies, however, weren't shy about making the riskier loans from 2004 to 2006. And like their customers, they are paying for it today.

The Sun's analysis identified 10 lenders among the top 20 in the county that each issued more than 70 percent of its loans to subprime customers. None of these companies participated in the governor's summit.

Most of the lenders have severe financial problems, the result of customers who could not repay loans. In most cases the companies either have quit issuing those loans or were acquired by healthier companies. Collectively, those and other subprime lenders have laid off tens of thousands of workers nationwide.

The lenders and the percentages subprime loans make up of their total loans in the county include: