NEWPORT BEACH, CA-Sabal Financial Group LP has created a venture with the FDIC to service and perform asset-management on a $386 million loan portfolio. Sabal paid $30 million for its minority stake in the venture, which includes both commercial and residential properties, according to FDIC records.

The loan portfolio deal is the third such venture that Sabal has entered into with the federal banking regulator. As GlobeSt.com previously reported in early October, the company acquired a $153-million portfolio of more than 100 performing and non-performing loans, primarily secured by retail, office and industrial properties and land. Sabal bought the portfolio from a Midwest bank. And in September, as GlobeSt.com also reported, the company acquired a $158-million loan portfolio of the failed FirsTier Bank of Louisville, CO from the FDIC's Small Investor Program.

Currently, Sabal has $3 billion of real estate under management, of which about $2 billion represent FDIC ventures. “It’s like having a silent majority partner,” says Sabal CEO Patterson Jackson about the venture with FDIC.

The public-private ventures are intended to be an improvement on the liquidation methods of the Resolution Trust Corp., which sold billions of dollars’ worth of real estate held by failed lenders in the 1990s. Those deeply discounted sales flooded the market with bargain-priced real estate, while limiting the ability of the federal agency to recoup its losses.

Under the new public-private venture model, asset managers like Sabal are encouraged to bring the best properties back to health and sell them profitably. Both the asset manager and the taxpayer share in any upside. The public-private venture is set to last seven years, at the end of which most of the properties should be sold, according to Sabal. “This is long term process,” he says.

The current package comprises 507 loans, both performing and non-performing loans, from 42 failed lenders located throughout the country. Separately, Sabal Financial also revealed that it has acquired a $142-million portfolio from the Bank of the Cascades.