Home Mortgage Loans

Homeowners sometimes contact the SEC when the lenders that made their home loans have sold the loans and the homeowners want to determine who owns them.  In these cases, a company called a mortgage servicer typically collects mortgage payments from the borrowers and forwards them to the new owners of the loans.  It may thus be difficult for homeowners to determine who has bought their mortgages.

Homeowners seeking information about who owns their mortgages should start by contacting their mortgage servicers.  Contact information for your servicer should be included with the monthly payment slip or monthly statement for your mortgage.  You can also use this website to look up your servicer’s contact information: http://www.makinghomeaffordable.gov/contact_servicer.html.

To check whether your loan has been sold to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, which are the federally sponsored housing finance companies, you can link to their loan look-up pages or call them at the phone numbers listed on this website:  http://www.makinghomeaffordable.gov/loan_lookup.html.

If you are facing foreclosure or having difficulty making mortgage payments, other federal agencies may be able to help.  The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) administers two programs to assist homeowners, the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) and the Home Affordable Refinance Program (HARP).  Information about both these programs is available online at http://www.makinghomeaffordable.gov, or by calling 1-888-995-HOPE (4673).

It may be that the buyer of your loan has packaged it with other loans into a “mortgage-backed security” that was sold to investors.  However, while the SEC regulates the disclosure provided to the investors in mortgage-backed securities, the SEC does not require that detailed information be provided regarding the individual loans or properties underlying the securities.  This is due in part to the desire to protect the privacy of the borrowers of the mortgages.  That means that the offering documents for the security into which your loan was packaged likely will not identify your mortgage by loan number or the address of your home, and thus likely will not be helpful to you in determining who owns your mortgage.