Trotter told me that the “true horror” of MERS [1818 Library Street, Suite 300 Reston, VA 20190, 1-800-646-6377] was what it could do to homeowners who were current on their mortgage payments: The “good” homeowners who still had a job and weren’t facing foreclosure. If there was no legal record of which bank owned their debt [see below if you haven't been following NC on MERS], and the MERS-mortgaged homeowners had been making payments, then who exactly was the homeowner paying? The checks, clearly, were going out every month, cashed by a bank that claimed to own the note. But without the legal record to certify the owner of the note, it followed that the bank could not legally issue the homeowner a clear title to the home. In effect, a homeowner with MERS on his mortgage could spend thirty years paying a lender that wasn’t the owner of the note. …. “[Y]ou’d always be looking over your shoulder,” said Trotter. “Some other lender could come and say ‘No, we owned that note. You paid the wrong guy.” “WIth MERS”, he said, “nobody owns anything. You’re only paying rent.” That’s not a bug. It’s a feature. At least for a rentier, although not necessarily for Trotter.
Second, Ketcham offers a lucid and succinct explanation of how this MERS feature came to be implemented:
[Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems] was created in 1995 as a privately held venture of the major mortgage-finance operators… Its stated purpose was to manage a confidential electronic registry for tracking of the sale of mortgage loans between lenders… No longer would the traffickers in mortgages have to document their transactions with county clerks, nor would they have to pay the many and varied courthouse fees… This centralized database facilitated the buying and selling of mortgage debt at great speed and greatly reduced cost. … Without the efficiencies [dread word] of MERS there probably would never have been a mortgage bubble.
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