In recent years, lenders are inclined to use MERS (Mortgage Electronic Registration System) to facilitate the transfers and record-keeping. When a loan is sold, the selling member initiates a transfer on the system and the buying member confirms that transfer. This saves the cost of printing, signing, and recording a paper assignment at the county.
There are two "ownership" aspects of your loan: the investor (or beneficial) rights and the servicing rights. Organizations like FNMA purchase loans (as the investor) but do not want to service them (collect the payments). So the servicing rights are placed with a servicing company or are retained by the company that made you the loan.
All you should really care about is who you make your payments to. The actual investor of the loan has no impact on you whatsoever as they are bound by the terms of your promissory note and mortgage/deed of trust and cannot change any of that without your approval (modification, refinance, etc.).
When the servicing rights to your loan are sold to another servicer, then you have an interest because the place of your payment (but nothing else) will change. The law requires the old servicer to send any payment you make on to the new servicer, and you cannot be tagged with a late charge or late payment ding on your credit IF you made that payment to the old servicer on time. But this is only good for two months or so; after that if you keep making payments to the wrong place you could be (and likely will be) subject to late charges and adverse credit reporting. They give you a little time to get your things straightened out to get the payments to the right place, but not forever.
They keep track by computers. And each individual lender could, if they wanted, pull data by state, by town, however. The Federal Reserve has access to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac data as well as mortgages still owned by some financial institutions - however, the FRB only published the data for the public in it's aggregated form (see here - http://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdat... The average person would not have the means or ability to get this data.
The banks keep track of their own loans
Who is they? You ask if "they" track this stuff, do you mean the government? Ownership is recorded for tax purposes, but do you mean which bank backs a loan at any given time?
it's all on computers - the records have multiple identifiers - address of property, names and soc sec #'s of borrowers, property tax ID numbers, etc
Is there any way to track home loan debt by state? Or, do the banks and businesses track home loans in each state? I'm under the impression, if I had bought a home at $50,000. And lets say I put down $10,000 down out of my savings. Leaving $40,000. Then the next day the bank sold my loan to another bank/company. How are those companies keeping track of who owns what? (There's a market for home loans and I'm trying to figure out how they keep track of everything).
