Who Owns Your MortgageAlthough it may seem as easy as checking your monthly statement to find out who owns your mortgage, its not even close to that simple. In fact, after a foreclosure lawsuit is filed the question of who actually has the right to sue you often remains one of the central issues in the case.Initially, there's an important distinction between "loan servicing" companies and the company that owns your mortgage. "Loan servicing" companies are hired by the true owners to handle everything from billing and collection of monthly payments to filing foreclosure lawsuits when necessary. What makes things even more confusing is that most of the loan servicing companies are owned by large banks and financial institutions which means you might get a letter from a division of Chase Bank as the servicing company for a loan owned by IndyMac, Deutsche Bank or others but not Chase! Once you establish which company is servicing your loan, the next issue is determining who owns your note and mortgage and therefore who has the right to sue you. The best place to find out is by asking the loan servicing company for ownership documentation but they are often unwilling or unable to provide the information for a number of reasons including the loan owners desire for privacy and other complicated ownership issues. Surprisingly to many homeowners, the current owner of your mortgage is rarely the original lender from your initial loan closing nor generally the lender from your mortgage refinancing or home equity line of credit. Instead, after your loan closing, most if not all of the original lenders sold their loan documents to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and others who then resold the mortgages to financial institutions on Wall Street. Bundles of 1000 or more of these mortgages were then sold as shares of stock or bond offerings known as mortgage backed securities on the financial markets meaning your loan documents may have been sold several times and the ownership issue is muddled at best. Although many legal scholars disagree as to whether the stock or bond fund owns each underlying mortgage or whether the shareholders each own fractional interests of each mortgage, the prevailing notion is that the trustee for the bond or stock fund is the actual owner and therefore the only party who can legally make ownership decisions regarding your mortgage. What the confusion over who owns your mortgage means is twofold-the first is that figuring out who really owns your mortgage may be difficult and in some cases impossible and secondly, ownership issues and who has the right to sue you may be a life saver, or more accurately a home saver as quite often the wrong party files the foreclosure lawsuit giving you a great opportunity to save your home and stop foreclosure sales.
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