It occurs to me that many of you might enjoy finding out what happened to your mortgage after you signed up for it. The Whatcom County Auditor now has many years of property transaction records viewable online, and if your mortgage has changed hands, that information will likely be filed there.

Go to the auditor’s home page — http://www.co.whatcom.wa.us/auditor/ — and in the column on the left, click “Recorded documents online.” Then click “agree.” You probably should read what you are agreeing to. If there’s anything important there, let me know…

Anyhow, once you click “agree,” you get to the “recorded document search” page. Again, look to your left and click “document search.”

The easiest way to look up your own property is via the tax parcel number. Click “parcel number” and enter that number, which you can find on your property tax bill or deed or whatever. If you don’t have your parcel number handy, you can also go to the assessor’s website, enter your address, and get it that way, but I’m too lazy busy to walk you through that process just now. If you can’t figure it out, let me know and I’ll try to help.

Don’t be tempted to just enter your own name on the auditor’s site. The sale of  your mortgage is NOT going to be indexed under your name, because YOU were not involved. And if you enter your bank’s name, you’re going to get hundreds of hits. You weren’t the only dude they lent money to.

Once you enter the parcel number, you can also limit the search to a specific time interval, but I don’t recommend that. You might miss something.

Anyhow, once you plug in that number and hit search, you’ll see a list of documents which you can open, save to your computer and/or print. If your mortgage is now part of a pool that pays bond investors, that information should be there.

Then, if you find that your mortgage is now owned by something like “GSAA Home Equity Trust 2007-4,” you can Google that. Among other things, you may be able to find out whether the trust is in any kind of legal/financial trouble. In this example–the subject of my Tuesday story–the Google search uncovered a class action lawsuit in federal court, an S&P report that predicted big losses for the trust’s investors, and an SEC filing that spelled out how many of the loans in the pool were “stated income.”

Probably none of this information is going to be really useful to you, but you may find it interesting. It may also explain why you’re having trouble working out a mortgage modification.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 9:19 am and is filed under Consumer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.