DS News - Digital Archives

Get to know the experts and insiders behind this issue. contributors JIMMY ALVAREZ is director of risk management for Financial Asset Services, Inc., (FAS), which specializes in asset management, property disposition, and valuation services. Alvarez has been with FAS since 2008 and oversees the firm's licensing and title curative units, which include legislative analytics in addition to his risk management duties. Alvarez has 25 years' combined REO, title curative, legislative analytics, and lending experience. His career includes tenure at Lehman Brothers Bank where he was VP of operations at its mortgage subsidiary, BNC Mortgage. He is also the author of Real Estate Lending in the New Millennium. KEITH BUTTON is a publications editor for Ernst & Young in New York and a freelance writer. As a reporter for Hedge Fund Alert, he broke the story on the Bear Stearns hedge fund meltdown in June 2007 that kicked off the credit crisis. In addition to reporting on the hedge fund sector, he writes for publications covering bank technology, mutual fund boards, broker-dealers, chief financial officers, military intelligence technology, and agriculture. He served as a reporter for the Watertown Daily Times in northern New York for 10 years and has researched and written white papers for various industries. KELLIE CHAMBERS is assistant VP of property preservation for Safeguard Properties. In this role, she leads the company's property preservation operations and client account representative teams. She oversees all aspects of Safeguard's property preservation service line, including order entry, client relations, regional coordination, and operations. Chambers joined Safeguard in 2001. In 2007, she was promoted to property preservation manager and in 2009 was promoted again to director. She also serves on the board of directors for Community Housing Solutions in Cleveland, Ohio, a nonprofit organization that works to fulfill the housing needs of the underserved. STEPHEN FAULKNER has spent more than 30 years in the mortgage industry. He is currently a partner with Operational Excellence, LLC (OpExNow), a boutique management consulting firm serving the mortgage banking industry. He's also the firm's managing director of strategic business development. Prior to joining OpExNow, he held executive management-level positions at a number of mortgage banking organizations. He served as president and COO of Vericrest Financial, was SVP of loss prevention at Saxon Mortgage where he led early implementation of the Home Affordable Modification Program, and was an SVP at Aurora Loan Services and Select Portfolio Servicing. JOSE GARCIA is a policy fellow at the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), responsible for evaluating and analyzing relevant housing and banking public policies that affect the Latino community, with an emphasis on housing finance and the secondary mortgage market. Garcia has over 10 years' experience working on household credit and debt, youth economics, voting rights, Census advocacy, and social- demographic analysis. Previously, he was associate director for the Economic Opportunity Program at Demos, where he authored dozens of reports on household debt and co-authored the book Up to Our Eyeballs: How Shady Lenders and Failed Economic Policies are Drowning Americans in Debt. BILL IRELAND writes on housing-related issues for various publications. He is also senior editor at PartnerFirst, a nationwide short sale network based in Corona, California. In that capacity, he writes and edits educational material for real estate agents; provides industry updates on current issues, programs, and policies; and regularly contributes to the group's blog on the short sale market. In his work, he draws on more than 10 years' experience as a real estate professional and a broad background in various writing genres that includes feature articles, monthly real estate columns, humor columns, and ghostwriting. 6

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