Deutsche Bank Berkshire Mortgage Services, LLC: The Subprime Mortgage Crisis

Abstract

Deutsche Bank Berkshire Mortgage Services is the world's largest real estate asset manager. Having over 600 billion dollars worth of assets worldwide, it is a financial institution that incorporates both underwriting and asset management divisions in their mortgage services. These two divisions collaborate in order to ultimately maximize returns to the bank, but also frequently experience a conflict of interests due to specific reasons that will later be discussed in this paper. I completed my experiential internship in the Asset Management branch of Deutsche Bank Berkshire Mortgage Services during the summer of2008 in Bethesda, MD. Within this division I worked under Richard Marion, Vice President of Loss Mitigation. Although Loss Mitigation is a very specific sector of Asset Management, many of the roles within the entire department were inter-related and interchangeable as well. The nature of all these relationships contributed to the diversity of my internship. On a day to day basis everything appeared to function independently, but beyond the surface the inherent dependency between the divisions manifested itself through collaboration in order to ultimately provide the best mortgage services with the interest of the bank as well and its investors as the first priority. The goals of this paper are to detail my experiences at the bank as well as apply the knowledge that I gained to important economic principles and recent market events. I will first provide a brief description of my job responsibilities and the valuable lessons that I received and then give a synopsis of the relevant market crisis by combining my personal experiences with the research that I have conducted on the topic.