If you’re a Republican hopeful, odds are you know Dale Dykema.
Dykema has helped GOP congressmen get elected with money and campaign advice. His beneficiaries include nearly all of the county’s congressional delegation: John Campbell, Ed Royce, Dana Rohrbacher, Ken Calvert, John Lewis, as well as former congressman and Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Chris Cox.
Lenders know Dykema for his day job.
He’s founder, chairman and chief executive of Santa Ana-based T.D. Service Financial Corp., which is looking at record profits this year amid the foreclosure wave.
Dykema’s company helps lenders process paperwork for foreclosed homes.
T.D. Service recently passed the 450,000 mark in foreclosures it’s worked on since getting into business in 1964.
Its expected sales of $70 million this year are more than double what it did in 1996, the previous foreclosure peak in Southern California.
“It takes time for the foreclosures to hit after the economy drops,” Dykema said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we hit a peak next year for this time around.”
Dykema (pronounced “die-ca-muh”) pioneered a niche for handling foreclosures for lenders after starting his business with a $3,000 investment.
He convinced lenders to use his company instead of title insurers, which most relied on at the time.
The idea came to Dykema while working for a title insurer in Los Angeles, where he was part of its foreclosure department.
“I saw an opportunity,” he said. “I could do what they were doing as a small company.”
Since then, T.D. Service has grown to about 200 employees, most of them local.
Nearly all of its business is for foreclosures of single-family homes, though it’s looking to expand into handling lender takeovers of commercial buildings.
T.D. Service has about 300 customers across the country, half of which are credit unions, as well as mortgage companies and savings and loans.
About a quarter of its foreclosures are tied to loans that were bundled as bonds and sold to Wall Street, Dykema said.
Most of his early business came from small savings and loans, which once were a larger part of home lending, according to Dykema.
The initial challenge was to take away long-standing relationships from title insurers.
“When I started, it was easy to develop relationships,it’s a lot more competitive today,” he said.
The company grew as more business was gained from title insurers, including his old company, Title Insurance and Trust Co., which no longer exists.
Competition
The company had its ups and downs, based on the foreclosure market.
In the current spike, T.D. Service has handled more than 2,000 foreclosures, which is about the same as what it did in 1996.
But the total number of foreclosures in Southern California is much higher than a decade ago, with competitors grabbing more work.
Competition always has been Dykema’s biggest challenge, he said.
In T.D. Service’s first 15 years, at least 30 competitors popped up and then failed, according to Dykema.
In the late 1990s, title insurers began to outsource the business, paving the way for competitors, he said.
For a fee, they would pass the business on. But Dykema said he didn’t feel paying for business was a good way of going about things.
Most of T.D. Service’s customers are gained through its sales force and referrals.
Commercial foreclosures could be the next wave of business for T.D. Service.
“We’re on a marketing campaign for that business,” Dykema said.
When foreclosures aren’t as plentiful, the company focuses on lien releases for revenue.
Lien releases are documents owners need to file after a loan is paid off, saying the property no longer is tied to a lender.
Homeowners can send information to T.D. Service to have the documents processed in every county in the country, Dykema said.
“The system prints out the proper form and check to pay the fee,” he said.
The company develops software related to public records, Dykema said.
“There’s a lot we haven’t taken advantage of,” he said.
Manual labor is involved in gathering information from public records and inputting it into a database, Dykema said. But more counties are beginning to make it all electronic, he said.
Other Interests
Dykema is just as passionate about his other interests.
“I’ve had a love for politics for as long as I can remember,” he said.
In the mid-1970s, he stepped up his involvement from being a volunteer on election days to running for City Council in Long Beach.
In his first campaign, he ran against about a dozen other candidates to take the place of someone who held the seat for two decades, he said.
He came in fourth place. But the experience allowed him to meet local leaders who encouraged him to run for the state Assembly in 1976 as the Republican nominee.
He lost that election. But Dykema said he learned useful things that would help others get elected.
Since 1978, Dykema’s been a member of the Lincoln Club, a conservative GOP group. He’s been a member of the more moderate New Majority since 1999.
One of his sons is chief of staff for Rep. Rohrbacher, who represents Huntington Beach and other areas along the coast.
Dykema is active with a number of nonprofits, serving on the boards of the YMCA, the Orange County Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, the Orange County Fair Board and the Tiger Woods Foundation. He’s chairman of the Tiger Woods Learning Center Foundation.
Dykema, who lives in Newport Beach, spent his early life in Grand Rapids, Mich., before moving to Los Angeles in 1957.
After a four-year stint in the Air Force, where he went to Syracuse University in New York for a year, he returned to Grand Rapids to graduate from Calvin College.
In the Air Force, he served as a Russian language specialist, at one point dealing with the top-secret radio monitoring of Soviet Union forces in Germany.
He received a business master’s from University of Michigan and graduated from Northwestern University’s School of Mortgage Banking.
Travel
In Dykema’s spare time, he said he likes to travel. Some of his more memorable trips have been to Antarctica, the Arctic, Egypt, Morocco, South Africa, China and Russia, he said.
“I like to take two trips out of the country each year,” Dykema said.
He’s also a big golfer, putting in at least two rounds a day on 10-day trips to Hawaii that he likes to take twice yearly.
“On a good day, I’ll do three rounds,” he said.
