USA: A Servicing System For Borrowers

Until now, servicing was done by lenders, for lenders. Servicing was about collecting payments at the lowest possible cost. You lost money by improving service to borrowers unless you could do it without increasing costs. Lenders have had no business reason to provide quality service. Borrowers can’t fire their servicers, except by refinancing. The refinance decision, however — whether to do it and who to do it with is rarely affected by borrowers’ servicing experience. It is not surprising, therefore, that mortgage servicing has not met the needs of borrowers. According to HUD, two of every five complaints alleging violations of the Real Estate Procedures Settlement Act involve servicing issues, as opposed to issues connected to settlement costs. 3 This is consistent with my own experience in fielding questions from borrowers, as noted below. Even what might appear to be exceptions to this generalization, such as alerting borrowers to the possibility of a cost-reducing refinance, are not really. Lenders seek to identify borrowers for whom the probability of refinancing is high, so they can cut them off at the pass. This is quite different from identifying those for whom the cost-benefit is high. There is overlap, to be sure, but the difference in intent is clear. In 1998 I began writing a newspaper column on mortgages that invited questions from consumers. I have since had about 12,000 letters left on my website, www.mtgprofessor.com, of which half or more are about servicing problems. The features of an SSB described below deal with the issues that arise most frequently.