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My home mortgage servicing was transferred to a new company.

In registering on the new company website, they say they would "like to welcome" me to their company and "advise" me of the services they offer. They then ask me to "verify the accuracy" of my loan info and upload copies of my home insurance policies to a third party website.

I've had loans transferred before and have never had to do this. The previous servicer had proof of insurance of course.

Am I required to dig up and submit documents to them? Or are they just trying to suck any and all info out of me that I'm willing to give them?

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  • Is there a provision in your mortgage agreement that requires you to have insurance on the property? I suspect there is, and I suspect they'll ask you to do this every renewal (unless the insurer provides this information directly to them).
    – littleadv
    Sep 19, 2022 at 6:38
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    who sent you the information about them being your new servicing company?
    – mhoran_psprep
    Sep 19, 2022 at 10:22
  • @littleadv - yes, there is. it's a little off-putting that the change of servicing requires work on my part, particularly since it hasn't the other times it happened. oh well.
    – aggieTaxes
    Sep 22, 2022 at 5:46
  • @mhoran_psprep - both the old and new companies, via regular mail. I do wish the old company would have sent the a notice on the webportal since that would be guaranteed genuine, versus a regular letter, which requires a bit of checking to make sure it's not fraudulent.
    – aggieTaxes
    Sep 22, 2022 at 5:48

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As a practical matter, rather than a legal one, declining to give information to your mortgage servicer seems exceptionally short-sighted.

Sure, when servicing is transferred, the old company is supposed to send over all the information the new company needs. And in the vast majority of cases, it does and everything is happy. But even if the information transfer process is 99.9% accurate end-to-end (and I'll wager that the actual accuracy rate will be lower), if the old servicer transferred servicing on 10,000 loans to the new company, there are 10 unfortunate people who have errors in their data. If you're one of those 10 people, you'd much rather catch and fix the error now rather than trying to fix it later after something has gone wrong.

If for whatever reason the new servicer doesn't have accurate information on your insurance and your mortgage agreement requires you to have home insurance (which the vast, vast majority of agreements will), then the new servicer will force place a new insurance policy. That's likely to be way more expensive than your current policy. Sure, you could contest that after the fact and you'd hopefully be able to get a refund of the fees you paid. But that's going to involve way more time and effort than simply downloading your policy document from your insurer's web site and forwarding that along to the new servicer.

As for privacy, your loan servicer is supposed to have a pretty large amount of information about you. Sure, if they're asking you to fill out a bunch of information that is obviously unrelated to servicing a mortgage, you've got a legitimate gripe. But if they're asking you to verify that there wasn't an error in the name, address, SSN, etc. they received from the previous servicer, you're not giving them anything that they shouldn't already have. And as a practical matter from the new servicer's standpoint, this is a good time to have people re-confirm contact information because lots of people will have new email addresses, phone numbers, etc. that they didn't bother to inform the previous servicer of.

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  • I agree wholeheartedly that trying to keep this info from the new servicer is not a good idea. But I'm also struck by the hoops I have to jump through - the new servicer should have all of my info like you said, and could just ask me to verify that the insurance info they have for me is correct. Instead, they want me to upload documents to a website that isn't even theirs, but is instead run by a third party.
    – aggieTaxes
    Sep 22, 2022 at 5:51
  • @aggieTaxes - It is possible that you were in the unlucky small percentage of users where some piece of information didn't transfer over correctly. It's annoying but probably not a lot you can do about it that would end up being less annoying to you. You could try sending an email asking if they really need that information or if they really got it from the previous servicer. But it'll probably take just as long to upload the docs and be done with it.
    – Justin Cave
    Sep 22, 2022 at 13:32

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