General Motors Acceptance Corporation - New York

Beautiful engraved RARE specimen certificate from the General Motors Acceptance Corporation printed in 1919. This historic document was printed by American Bank Note Company and has an ornate border around it with a vignette of an eagle on top of a globe with the GMAC Logo.


Certificate Vignette

In 1919, General Motors Acceptance Corporation was established to finance the sale of General Motors cars and trucks. General Motors Acceptance Corporation (or GMAC) was the financial services arm of General Motors, the world's largest automobile manufacturer (by revenue).

GMAC Financial Services provide a suite of financial programs including automotive financing, insurance and mortgage operations in 40 countries around the world.

GMAC also operates Nuvell Financial Services within its automotive financing division. While the main GMAC obviously specializes in the financing of new and "certified used" GM vehicles, Nuvell is for rival auto companies that do not have a financial arm, as well as for late-model used cars from dealerships that use bank financing. Kia Motors America is one of the companies to use Nuvell for their new vehicle sales.

Its other businesses include ResCap Holding, an umbrella company for GMAC's residential mortgage business, and GMAC Home Services, a real estate services subsidiary. As well, it is an associate sponsor of all Hendrick Motorsports racing teams.

ResCap Holding is the parent for GMAC Mortgage, GMAC-RFC, GMAC Bank, Ditech.com, and Homecomings Financial.

GMAC Home Services is the parent for GMAC Real Estate, formed by the purchase of Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate in 1998, GMAC Global Relocation Services, and GHS Mortgage.

In order to raise money for a reorganization, General Motors has been divesting of many assets including GMAC. This divestiture was accelerated at the prompting of investor Kirk Kerkorian and his former representative on GM's board, Jerome York.

On March 23, 2006, General Motors announced that it completed the sale of a 78% interest in GMAC Commercial Holding, its commercial real estate subsidiary, for $1.5 billion in cash to a private investment group including Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., Five Mile Capital Partners and Goldman Sachs Capital Partners. The deal includes the payoff of all intracompany debt owed to GMAC, bringing the total value of the deal to $9 billion. The new entity, in which GMAC owns a 21% interest is known as Capmark Financial Group, Inc.

On April 3, 2006, GM announced that it would sell 51% of GMAC as a whole to a consortium led by Cerberus Capital Management, raising $14 billion over 3 years. Investors also include Citigroup's private equity arm and Aozora Bank of Japan. The group will pay GM $7.4 billion in cash at closing. GM will retain approximately $20 billion in automobile financing worth an estimated $4 billion over three years.

The sale was completed in December of 2006.

History from Wikipedia and OldCompanyResearch.com.

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About Specimens

Specimen Certificates are actual certificates that have never been issued. They were usually kept by the printers in their permanent archives as their only example of a particular certificate. Sometimes you will see a hand stamp on the certificate that says "Do not remove from file".

Specimens were also used to show prospective clients different types of certificate designs that were available. Specimen certificates are usually much scarcer than issued certificates. In fact, many times they are the only way to get a certificate for a particular company because the issued certificates were redeemed and destroyed. In a few instances, Specimen certificates we made for a company but were never used because a different design was chosen by the company.

These certificates are normally stamped "Specimen" or they have small holes spelling the word specimen. Most of the time they don't have a serial number, or they have a serial number of 00000. This is an exciting sector of the hobby that grown in popularity over the past several years.