How do I find out who owns my mortgage?

John W. Schoen Senior producer • Profile • E-mail

Homeowners who are having trouble with their mortgages seem to get the same advice wherever they turn: at the first sign of trouble, call your lenders and see if you can work out a payment plan. But that means figuring out who owns your mortgage — which is not as easy as it looks.

I have been trying unsuccessfully to find out who owns my mortgage but the servicing company just gives me a run around. Don't I have a right to know who owns my mortgage? I need to work out a loan modification but can't find out who to call and the servicing company isn't helping.
— J. W., Chesapeake City, Md.

Of the many nightmares facing homeowners caught up in the mortgage mess, this one is perhaps the most frustrating. From individual lenders to the government-sponsored Hope Now Alliance devoted to untangling this mess, the advice to borrowers is the same: as soon as you think you’re headed for trouble, contact the lenders to see about working out an alternate payment plan.

It’s good advice. The sooner you act, the better your chances of not falling so far behind the situation becomes irreversible. For their part, lenders don’t want you to lose your home either. The last thing they need is another piece of real estate to add to the long list of unsold properties on their books.

But contacting the lender means figuring out who owns your loan. In the turmoil that followed the collapse of the housing boom, some lenders went out of business or were bought up by bigger lenders — and the loans from those defunct lenders changed hands.

As the mortgage market has dried up, lenders have had to lay off workers who, just a few years ago, had a hard time keeping up with the flood of new mortgages. Now, with foreclosures rising, there are fewer employees on the other end of the phone to help homeowners in trouble. Experienced real estate attorneys and professional housing counselors report that they’re also not having much luck navigating the maze of voicemail.

Worse, there may be no single “owner” of your loan if the original mortgage was bundled with hundreds of others and placed in a trust which was then sold off in pieces to hundreds of investors. The servicer — the company hired to make sure the monthly payments got to the right investors — never expected to have so many loans go bad. So they weren't really set up to re-negotiate payment terms with thousands of borrowers.

Still, many of those servicers do have the legal authority to work with you on a payment plan you can handle. It’s their job to maximize investors’ returns, and having you default isn’t going to help anyone. If you can get through to the servicer’s “loss mitigation” department, you might be able to get the conversation going.

A better option might be to get some help from a HUD-approved housing counselor or a lawyer who specializes in working with lenders and may be able to help you cut through the significant thicket of red tape. Check out Web site of the National Foundation for Credit Counseling to locate an office near where you live. If you can’t afford a lawyer, look for a non-profit Legal Services office; many of them are spending a lot more time these days on housing and mortgage issues.

And be sure to check out this story by my msnbc.com colleague Laura Coffey on how to sidestep landmines that can lead to foreclosure.

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