New Developments in the Mortgage Industry
... and it's not a pretty picture when it comes to obfuscating the real party in interest!
(NEWS — OP-ED) — Back in October of 2018, a major corporation called Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. (“ICE”) acquired MERSCORP Holdings, Inc.
MERSCORP Holdings, Inc., which used to be called MERSCORP, Inc., owned another subsidiary called Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc. (“MERS”). MERSCORP changed its name after the “damage” had been done due to the 2008 financial collapse. For those of you who do NOT have an inkling as to what has permeated the land records of every county, township, ward or borough in America, I’ll give you a sneak peek:
And then MERS was subsumed into MERSCORP, Inc., which then was subsumed into MERSCORP Holdings, Inc.:
While there are dozens of patents and documents connected with this entity, the main purpose was clear: To allow the banks to enter the securities markets, create tax-exempt trusts and prospectuses for the purposes of selling certificates to investors to further their exploits into the residential and commercial mortgage lending processes, all the while the ratings companies gave the investments triple-A ratings when they were anything but.
Following ICE’s acquisition of MERSCORP Holdings, Inc. (ICE also owns the NYSE), it acquired Simplifile, LLC in 2019 for $335-million. At that time, Simplifile operated one of the largest networks that connects agents and jurisdictions that underpin residential mortgage records, serving as an electronic liaison between lenders, settlement agents and county recording offices, streamlining the local recording of residential mortgage loan transactions. To this author, this further represents more obfuscation within the chain of title because of all of the in-house records kept by Simplifile that are outside of the arms-length processes found in the land records.
This month, ICE again made another major move, acquiring Black Knight Financial Services for $11.9-billion. Black Knight absorbed Lender Processing Services, LLC, which had a subsidiary called DOCX, which found itself in the middle of a criminal scandal, wherein its president, Lorraine Brown, was convicted of masterminding a scheme to record millions of bogus documents in land records all across the country, using robosigned, forged documents, which is where the infamous “Linda Green” came into fruition.
Black Knight is a home loan servicing and data analytics provider. The combination of all of these entities into ICE now presents homeowners with a real dilemma: How to decipher what is true from what is false in the land records in the counties where their properties are situated (in other words, if you have a property that has a MERS mortgage recorded on it, you’re probably going to have to file a quiet title action to clear title to the property to make it cleanly marketable in the future).
In this next section, I’ll discuss the in’s and out’s of getting rid of those bogus records and quieting title to properties that may be affected by the “MERS debacle”.
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