Very interesting. What’s put this whole thing “on my radar screen” is that every online article I’ve read involves a story about MERS and foreclosures.
Yes. MERS, as I understand it, is structured as a corporation but exists primarily as a centralized electronic “registry” for mortgages. It is this centralized registry function which enables a: folks who are located remotely from the situs of registration, eg; the county seat where the subject property is located and b: folks who cannot easily obtain access to online property records town-by-town, such records being completely non-uniform as to the means of access, form and field(s) length, etc; etc.
In other words, MERS facilitates title investigation: the whole securitization and credit-reporting and lien-discovery processes are **dramatically** enhanced by having these types of records located/available online, in readily searchable format. That is inarguable.
What many of these recent lawsuits are about is that lienholders and noteholders have sought to foreclose based upon entries in MERS. Well, convenience is one thing, actionable legal proceedings are another, in terms of the docs you need to prove things. As you probably know, many courts have held that an original mortgage note or deed of trust has to produced for a mortgage to institute a foreclosure proceeding. And many, many of these morts have been sliced and the separate tranches distributed in unimaginable ways and nobody thought they’d ever have to undo the slicing. In essence the foreclosing lender in many, many cases has not been able to produce their copy of the note! AND, they have not been getting checks from the borrower, they have been getting checks from a servicer. So, they don’t even have a stack of Xeroxed checks payable to them to show second-class evidence of indebtedness. Sucks to be them!