Companies evicted amid housing slump

At least two Costa Mesa mortgage companies have been evicted from their headquarters in the city’s upscale north end, a spokesman for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department confirmed Wednesday.

Sheriff’s spokesman Jim Amormino said Quick Loan Funding and Loyalty Funding, both owned by businessman Nazih Daniel Sadek, officially left their offices at 535 Anton Blvd. at 11:05 a.m. Tuesday.

A November complaint by the state Department of Corporations had identified Sadek as the owner of two other companies in the building, Sadek Inc. and Platinum Coast Escrow, and Amormino said while those names did not appear on the eviction notice, four total floors at the building had been evacuated.

The owner of the office building declined comment on the situation. Efforts to reach Sadek were unsuccessful.

The Harbor Justice Center in Newport Beach had ordered the eviction Dec. 11, Amormino said.

The recent housing market rut, he said, had led to a rise in eviction notices.

“Because of the slump in housing and loans being readjusted, there’s more now than there has been,” Amormino said. “But it seems to be concentrated on mortgage companies.”

Ed Fawcett, the president of the Costa Mesa Chamber of Commerce, said none of Sadek’s four companies were members of the chamber and that he hadn’t personally heard of any of them.

He added, though, that he wasn’t surprised to hear about another group of lenders going out of business.

“There were some egregious violators of lending out there,” Fawcett said. “Just on a personal basis, I’ve heard from brokers who were pretty much honest and up front, and there were some out there that were really working the system. This may have been one of those.”

The Department of Corporations, in its Nov. 7 complaint, sought to revoke the licenses of Sadek’s four companies on Anton Boulevard and to bar him from any future position with an escrow agent. The statement claims Sadek used the companies’ trust funds for credit at a pair of Las Vegas casinos and that Miguel Angel Vazquez, the escrow accountant for Platinum Coast, repeatedly used trust funds for his own benefit.

MICHAEL MILLER may be reached at (714) 966-4617 or at michael.miller@latimes.com.