Loan Entrepreneur Charts a New Course

When Anthony Hsieh isn't running his Irvine-based online mortgage company, he regularly skippers a 60-foot yacht, plying the seas in search of quarter-ton marlin and other outsize billfish.

But this month, it was Hsieh who was hooked.

The 39-year-old is selling his Home LoanCenter.com to LendingTree, a unit of IAC/InterActiveCorp that matches borrowers and lenders. Terms of the deal, expected to close by year's end, were not disclosed.

Hsieh (pronounced SHAY) will report to LendingTree's founder and chief executive, Douglas Lebda -- another Internet entrepreneur, who a year ago sold his start-up to IAC, which is run by Hollywood-turned-online mogul Barry Diller.

For LendingTree, the acquisition marks an important strategic shift as the company branches out from mortgage finder to loan originator. For HomeLoanCenter, the transaction is a way to become part of a bigger operation -- with a proven brand name -- that can steer it a steady stream of customers.

Hsieh recalled that once he and Lebda started talking about a deal last spring, "it was a meeting of the minds about what we want to do and what we want to accomplish."

LendingTree, Hsieh added, "understands our culture," which places a premium on recognizing those who work hard.

Free lunches have been among the perks at HomeLoanCenter's offices. And each month, the company's top performer has been rewarded with an all-expenses-paid trip on Hsieh's yacht.

Exactly what kinds of inducements LendingTree will offer employees remain to be seen. But Hsieh said he himself expected to be among the company's standouts.

Few doubt it.

After all, Lebda said, Hsieh "has a knack" for bringing in and keeping "customers serious about getting a loan."

Hsieh got into the online mortgage business in 1999, when he moved his Huntington Beach-based firm, Tricor Mortgage Lending, onto the Internet and renamed it LoansDirect.com.

Two years later, he sold LoansDirect to E-Trade Financial Corp. for a reported $35 million. The acquisition put the Menlo Park, Calif., online stock brokerage into the consumer lending business just as a drop in interest rates touched off one of the biggest refinancing booms in recent history.

At the time, Hsieh said he intended to stay at E-Trade as his company became the foundation for its mortgage unit.

Yet the business of financing loans online was still young, and E-Trade was puzzling through how best to make it all work. "Everybody was trying to figure out what to do," Hsieh said.