Mortgage servicing rights
contractual rights to service a mortgage in the United States
In the mortgage industry of the United States, mortgage servicing rights (MSR) are the contractual rights to service a mortgage after the mortgage origination process is complete. Mortgage servicing is the management of the repayment of mortgage debt on behalf of the lender, including the collection and recording of mortgage payments. The legal entity that holds the mortgage servicing rights is the mortgage servicer.
The initial holder of servicing rights is the mortgage lender (the creditor). These rights are a transferable asset; they may be bought and sold on the secondary mortgage market.
Overview
The mortgage loan and the legal rights to service that loan are two distinct financial instruments. After mortgage origination, the mortgage lender may elect to sell one or both of them, each independently of the other, on the secondary mortgage market.
The mortgage servicer is responsible for collecting mortgage payments and managing escrow accounts. When a borrower makes a mortgage payment, some of the payment applies to the principal balance, and some to interest. The servicer forwards these proceeds to the mortgage holder for a servicing fee.
“Mortgage servicing rights” enters the record as contractual rights to service a mortgage in the United States. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Mortgage, servicing and rights can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mortgage servicing rights” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.