Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Company seeks bankruptcy after losing mortgage broker’s license

Las Vegas hard money real estate lender Vince Hesser's OneCap Holding Corp. filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy liquidation on Thursday.

The company, also known as OneCap Inc., is associated with OneCap Mortgage Corp., which last month had its mortgage broker's license revoked by the state Division of Mortgage Lending after a series of enforcement actions by the agency dating to 2007.

OneCap Mortgage, which initially was licensed by the state in 1994, last July agreed to settle a state investigation into its business practices and by December it says it had stopped servicing loans.

Its mortgage broker's license was revoked last month because of the company's failure to abide by the terms of the settlement, the state agency said.

During the Las Vegas real estate boom, in 2004 and 2005, OneCap was involved in hundreds of real estate transactions involving hundreds of millions of dollars. During the first quarter of 2005, for instance, the company disclosed it had produced 84 transactions valued at $68 million.

In June 2004, the company reported it had 20 full-time employees and had 58 independent affiliated real estate agents.

The company operated as OneCap Mortgage, OneCap Realty and OneCap Properties.

As a hard money lender, OneCap accepted investments from investors and then loaned the funds for real estate development projects. Unlike traditional commercial loans issued by banks, such hard money loans typically were risky and paid investors higher rates of return than they would receive from bank deposits.

OneCap Realty operated as a licensed real estate broker while OneCap Properties operated as an owner, equity participant and developer of real estate properties.

Besides the state investigation, OneCap was hurt by the recession like other lenders as real estate values fell and borrowers had trouble making their loan payments.

Thursday's bankruptcy filing didn't include specific dollar amounts, but said the company had assets of less than $50,000 and liabilities ranging from $1 million to $10 million.

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