Video Transcript:
If there's some interest in a financial institution or a company that has exposure to a financial institution, auditing the mortgage collateral for that institution might be a valuable way to make sure the assets are correct. This is Dave at TitleSearch.com. If there's a merger, acquisition, some type of lending event happening, and the collateral listed as security or as an asset is real estate mortgages; whether it's residential or commercial. One very important aspect is to make sure those assets are protected -they're secured correctly. In some of the audits we've done on thousands of mortgages, we found 25 or 30 percent of the mortgage instruments were not recorded properly. In some cases, weren't recorded at all. A bank may not have recorded the mortgage instrument. It may may have been signed correctly, but just never brought to the courthouse for recording. In some cases, it was never executed by the borrowers. In certain scenarios, we found that the borrower isn't even the owner of record listed on the title to that property. So that might compromise the validity of the asset of that mortgage-backed asset on the balance sheet. So if you're lending against a financial institution, if you're doing a transaction where the financial institution is a party to the transaction, verifying their assets, including those mortgage document assets, that they're recorded properly, there's no liens against them, there's no clouds on the title, the ownership is proper, is a great way to make sure that the book value of that company is reflected correctly with those mortgages -whether it's an FDIC audit, a private equity audit, or even a government regulation scenario. If you have questions about doing title research on real estate or document retrieval, you can reach us at our website at title search dot com.