Berkshire, Leucadia Buying Capmark Assets

Being Warren Buffett is pretty darn good work if you can get it.

Who else actually gets paid by a company they’re planning to buy?

Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and Leucadia National Corp. plan to buy Capmark Financial Group’s mortgage loan and servicing business for as much $490 million. Capmark said it paid the Berkshire-Leucadia joint venture Berkadia LLC $40 million for a guarantee that they would buy Capmark’s business.

Capmark may go into Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the result of bad loans that left it with a $1.62 billion second-quarter loss. If the sale happens through the bankruptcy process, Berkadia would pay $375 million cash, get a $75 million note, and keep $40 million to cover indemnity claims.

Buffett has been using cash to buy up or invest in companies hit by the credit crisis. In 2008, he spent $5 billion to buy preferred shares of Goldman Sachs. And he has added to his stakes in Wells Fargo and U.S. Bancorp.

“He clearly is the banker of last resort, and it appears that last resort now means collapse,” Michael Yoshikami, chief investment strategist at YCMNet Advisors, which manages about $850 million including Berkshire shares, told Bloomberg. “There’s certainly the possibility that somebody else is going to come in. But with everyone’s capital levels stretched, there’s not a lot of companies that can.”

Capmark, owned by firms including Goldman Sachs and KKR & Co., is a former General Motors loan subsidiary. It’s one of the largest commercial lenders in the U.S., servicing more than $360 billion in debt.