MERS® has always advocated a regular reconciliation of your portfolio on their system. With new or increased fees introduced in the last year or two, there is now a significant financial disincentive to putting this off.
If you service and purchase loans, you have a greater exposure than most other members to facing these fees at some point. Recent economic conditions have increased the number of members that have resigned and they may have done so before completing a cleanup of their own portfolio, including loans you may have purchased.
Unless you have been extremely diligent in staying on top of this, you may have loans in your servicing portfolio that were never transferred to you on MERS® at settlement. Indeed, some loans you have purchased may have never been initially registered by the originator. If MERS® receives communication on a loan that has not been registered, or is in the portfolio of a resigned member, they perform research to identify the current servicer. If you are the servicer, you end up with a $95 per loan External Research Fee, possibly in addition to a Seasoned Loan Transfer fee and a Member Certificate fee. These costs can add up to $111.95 for each loan thus processed.
Poppe Mortgage Services can help you avoid most or all of these fees, and additional burdens on your staff, by reconciling your portfolio for you. For a single small fee per serviced loan with a MERS® current servicer discrepancy, we can arrange to have those MINs transferred by your seller. If they have resigned, we can also perform the member certificate process for you. No less importantly, we can help you clear items from your MERS® portfolio that have been sold, paid off, foreclosed, or charged off.
Going forward, our Due Diligence service offering will allow us to advise you of loans in a potential purchase where the seller is not in a position to transfer rights to you at settlement. We can update this information for you periodically up through the settlement date, which allows you to eliminate those loans from the pool or adjust the pricing to accommodate your potential costs in clearing them up after the fact.
More information on both of these services can be obtained by contacting Poppe Mortgage Services at 281-257-8800 or via email at
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