Earlier this month, title and real estate services company Stewart Information Services Corp., owned by SISCO Holdings, agreed to acquire the mortgage services of property preservation provider Mortgage Contracting Services (MCS) for $330 million.
The transaction, which expands Stewart’s suite of services in the property preservation arena, supports default servicing while providing MCS with additional capital to invest in other business lines.
Macquarie Capital acted as the exclusive, sell-side financial adviser to MCS. In an interview with HousingWire, Jason White — Macquarie’s managing director of software and services,, investment banking and principal investing — discussed Macquarie’s advisory approach, the context behind the transaction, and the outlook for mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity heading into 2026.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity
Sarah Wolak: It’s been a week since Stewart announced the acquisition of MCS’s mortgage services. Can you explain more about what this deal entails?
Jason White: This is a carve-out of the mortgage division within MCS. The mortgage division represents about 75% of the total business.
And so the way we approached this originally was looking at their focus on growing other business segments within MCS — specifically single-family rental (SFR) and commercial contracts, as well as some government contracts — so less focused on mortgage and those silos.
… And so we said, ‘Look, you’ve stood up a business here that’s generating meaningful revenue in only two short years. Let us help you carve out the mortgage division, because there’s a lot of demand.’ … That message really resonated well with the current shareholder base, and that was why we were hired to do that. We spent the last four or five months running a very bespoke process … and that was essentially why we got the mandate.
Wolak: You just touched on some of the factors that made MCS an attractive asset, but as their exclusive adviser, what were the collective, primary objectives guiding the transaction for those four to five months?
White: Maximizing valuation and finding a good home for the business, so it was a carve-out of a pretty seasoned team with its own org chart, its own proprietary tech platform that ran its own P&L. In all best cases, it was something that could run and be very turnkey for strategic buyers.
And what we saw was [it] can either go into other ancillary mortgage services. So for example, if you’re in title like Stewart, you could unlock title from the servicing side. You could tap into adjacent mortgage services, which is what Stewart really found to be exciting the most — getting into property inspections and maintenance, and getting the customers of MCS for the top 30 loan servicers in the country. To be able to tap into that network for their own benefits across other mortgage services was huge.
Wolak: You mentioned that you evaluated the strategic buyers versus the financial buyers. What do you think set Stewart apart in being the right buyer for MCS?
White: We limited the process to strategics, or sponsored back strategics, meaning that they had to have a platform already in place, because this was a carve-out, so it wasn’t coming with a C-suite, HR, accounting or back office, right?
So the buyer had to have those kinds of things in place already. If you were to sell just to a sponsor that didn’t have a platform, they would be at a pretty significant disadvantage in our process. They would have to put in that additional infrastructure to make it work. They also needed to be aware of the seasonality and the cyclicality of the markets. It had to make sense from either expanding your own total addressable market (TAM) or expanding your additional mortgage services, which is what this did.
Wolak: Can you walk me through the key challenges or complexities that happened while executing this transaction?
White: I think the biggest challenge is that it’s not a sale of a full company, so we had to find buyers who either knew the space and wanted to be in the space, or were already in the sector.
Most of the time, these customers of the landscape that MCS is in typically share customers. They don’t usually have 100% of one customer. And so if you were to sell this to someone who had the other half of the customer that we had, then that would be cannibalistic, because as soon as the customer realized that you had 100% of their business, they would go and then give 50% to some other competitor.
So we had to be careful about who we approached on the pure competitor pedestal, and then it just became, well, who else could be interested? And it’s typically those that may already be in SFR and commercial that are looking to do mortgage, or it might be an easier way in to get into mortgage and then expand the TAM out.
So there’s expanding, and there’s expanding the TAM strategy, or it’s expanding into other ancillary mortgage services. Whether that be title or appraisal or insurance, we felt like these groups could have an interest, and Stewart was the one who really ultimately stepped up.
Wolak: Given that Macquarie was the exclusive adviser, how does this transaction fit into the company’s broader strategy of M&A?
White: Extremely well. We sit in what’s called the software and services team, which is software and tech-enabled services, so we’ve got some pretty core power alleys within the team — mortgage tech and proptech — which are huge opportunities for me since I run that.
It is a very important practice to continue to grow. There’s a lot of fragmentation across the sector. I was brought on [to Macquarie] just for that benefit. I came over from a prior firm about a year and a half ago to really grow and expand this particular focus within the firm, and that’s what we’re doing.
Wolak: What does the industry’s M&A appetite look like from Macquarie’s perspective?
White: It’s massive. We’ve signed up a number of transactions in the last few months. We feel like the ice is finally breaking across the landscape, especially within mortgage and proptech specifically. I think 2026 is going to be a big year.
I think we’re sort of seeing a return to normalization across the market. We had artificial caps on a lot of these kinds of businesses due to COVID-19, due to the loss-mitigation programs that are finally running their course. That’s probably the best way to put it across the mortgage sector. As a result, we see businesses like this thriving.