Under the deal, the F.D.I.C. will create a joint venture with Residential Credit Solutions of Fort Worth, a three-year-old company founded by Dennis Stowe, a veteran of the subprime mortgage industry.

Residential Credit will put up $64 million of its own money to obtain a 50 percent stake in the venture, which will hold and manage the $1.3 billion pool of mortgages from Franklin Bank.

The F.D.I.C. will own the other 50 percent stake in exchange for providing the loans as well as the bulk of the financing. Instead of taking cash for the loans, the F.D.I.C. will accept a government-guaranteed note for $727.8 million with an interest rate of 4.25 percent.

Agency officials said the deal meant that investors would be paying about 70 cents on the dollar for the loan portfolio, which is a higher price than hedge funds and other private investors have been willing to pay for troubled mortgages.

Had the government not provided Residential Credit with the ability to borrow most of the money it needed at low interest rates, agency officials said, the investors would have probably paid about 20 cents on the dollar less than they did.

Agency officials said the same kind of deal could be used to buy up troubled assets from banks that are still in business, which was the original purpose of the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. Since that program was approved by Congress last October, it has propped up banks, insurance companies, Wall Street firms and even car companies. But it has not been used to buy any troubled assets.

Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.

The main reason has been reluctance by both banks and investors, and some industry executives said they were still skeptical. Frank Pallotta, executive vice president of the Loan Value Group in Rumson, N.J., which provides analysis of mortgage values, said that many investors were worried about the strings attached to government-backed deals. One of the biggest strings is a requirement that the investors take part in the Obama administration’s Home Affordable Modification Program, which subsidizes loan modifications for borrowers at risk of losing their houses to foreclosure.

“The more active loan buyers are really not looking at these pools of loans,” said Mr. Pallotta. “I don’t think this sale is going to send investors off to the races.”

Advertisement Continue reading the main story

Officials said about 30 percent of the loans in the deal on Wednesday were nonperforming, meaning that payments were not being made on them, but said that percentage could increase depending on how much the houses being financed had dropped in value. About one-quarter of all homes are now under water, meaning that the property’s current market value is less than the mortgage.

Because homeowners have much less incentive to stay in houses that are under water, investors have become extremely dubious about mortgages in areas where housing prices have fallen sharply, even if most of the borrowers are still current on their payments.

The Obama administration has been working for months on two separate programs under the rubric of public-private partnerships to mop up the immense volume of bad assets tied to the housing bubble.

The F.D.I.C. program is intended to spur the purchase of whole mortgages, for both residential and commercial real estate, which are weighing down banks and adding to the uncertainties about their viability.

But banks have been extremely reluctant to sell their mortgages at a discount to their original value, because they would have to book losses.

The government’s other main public-private effort, run by the Treasury Department, is aimed at buying up mortgage-backed securities. Treasury officials have hired a half-dozen big money-management firms, which will raise $500 million in private capital each and then receive government financing to start working out deals.

That program has taken longer than expected to get off the ground, but Treasury officials expect the firms to start making deals in October.