If you’ve ever needed to contact your mortgage lender to ask questions or perhaps work out a change in payments, you recognize that knowing who owns your mortgage is necessary but sometimes not as easy as it sounds. You should be able to call the phone number on your last mortgage statement or the number in your payment coupon book. This should connect you directly with your lender. However, more often this merely puts you in touch with the loan servicer – the business that collects and processes payments. Incredibly, in some cases, the servicer is prohibited from revealing the true identity of your lender. In other cases, the person on the other end of the line will have no idea who the lender is.
Mortgages are often broken down into smaller parts and put back together into mortgage backed securities (MBS’s) that are sold and traded on Wall Street. Some investors belong to an automated system called MERS (Mortgage Electronic Registration System). MERS tracks who owns the mortgage and note as it changes hands among investors, along with who services it. MERS sometimes provides an additional level of anonymity. On many mortgages, the Mortgagee is listed only as MOM (MERS as Original Mortgagee). This means you have to try to look it up in the MERS registry. MERS makes the name and contact information of the mortgage servicer available, but not information about the investor. That information is for the servicer or investor to disclose, not MERS.
