Lowell Deeds

Mortage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc is the most frequent name entered as a grantee when it comes to mortgages and discharges. But MERS is only an agent for real lenders. When MERS was created back in 1999 (approximately) we decided to enter only the name MERS and not the name of the underlying lender in our index. Since the whole purpose of MERS was to be the entity that handled all the mortgage related paperwork, that was a logical thing to do plus, with the number of mortgages being recorded rising to historically high rates, entering extra names (i.e., the name of the lender) seemed inefficient. Still, we are often curious about who MERS represents, so we did some analysis of MERS filings over the past two years. Based on a representative sampling, we found that 25% of all MERS mortgages came from California, 20% originated within Massachusetts; 8% came from Texas; 7% came from Pennsylvania; 6% each came from Michigan and Florida and 5% came from New York. A few other states originated less than 5% of the MERS mortgages. In the coming days, we will let you know the names of the companies that used MERS most often.