Can I fire my mortgage servicer?

"I'm very unhappy with the lender servicing my mortgage. Would you spell out the procedures for changing lenders?"

Bad news, the only way to change the lender servicing your loan is by refinancing. Unless you have other reasons to refinance, that is a costly way to get a new lender, especially when you have no way of knowing that the new one will be better than the old one. There should be a better way, and I will suggest one below.

With some exceptions, the quality of servicing ranges from poor to abysmal, for reasons that are no secret. The financial incentives to provide good service to customers, which work in other sectors of our economy, don't work for loan servicing. The firm servicing mortgages will not get more customers by improving service quality, only higher costs. And the firm providing minimal service or less will not lose customers, because their customers are locked in. 

While this problem has been around for some time, the development of the sub-prime market in the

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