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Round and round it goes. Where it stops, nobody knows
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It’s like a shell game. The magician keeps moving the shells around and dares you to recognize under which shell the pea is hiding.
Only we’re not talking carnival tricks here, We’re talking about the proprietorrship of your mortgage. In his Realty Times article, “Who Owns My Mortgage?”, Ralph Roberts reports that it may not be a straightforward as you’d think to figure out just who lays claim to your loan when trying to get in touch to work out a payment plan..
“Unfortunately finding out is not as easy as it sounds,” says Roberts. “You should be able to call the phone number on your last mortgage statement or the number in your payment coupon book and connect directly with your lender. More often than not, this merely puts you in touch with the servicer – the business that collects and processes your payments. In some cases, the servicer is prohibited from divulging the true identity of your lender. In other cases, the person you're dealing with has no idea who your lender is.”
He goes on to explain tthat mortgages are often chopped up into mortgage backed securities (MBS's) that are sold and traded on Wall Street,, contained within an automated system called MERS (Mortgage Electronic Registration System). This entity keeps track of who owns the mortgage and note as it changes hands among investors, as well as who services it for that investor.
“MERS can provide another level of anonymity to the process. On many mortgages, the Mortgagee (the party that was granted the mortgage) is listed only as MOM (MERS as Original Mortgagee). No, that doesn't mean you can call your mom to find out who owns your mortgage note. It means you have to try to look it up in the MERS registry,” reports Roberts. “Customers trying to look up the investor on the MERS registry will not find it. MERS makes the name and contact information of the servicer available, but not the name and contact of the investor. That information is for the servicer or investor to disclose, not MERS.”
This slicing and dicing obfuscation only served to add to the confusion as the mortgage meltdown sank many banks and other lending institutions which were taken over by other banks or regulators, making it unlike the banking crisis of the early 1990s.
Click here to learn what steps to take when trying to track down your lender.
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