You talk to practically any lender and apply for a loan. They do all the processing and verifications and finally, you own the house and now you have a home loan and you make mortgage payments. You might be making payments to the company who originated your loan, or your loan might have been transferred to another institution.
The company you make your payments to very rarely owns your loan. They are the "servicer" of your mortgage. They are called the servicer because they are simply "servicing" your loan for the institution that does own it.
You see, what happens behind the scenes is that your loan got packaged into a "pool" with a lot of other loans and sold off to one of the three institutions listed above. The servicer of your loan gets a monthly fee from the investor for processing payments and taking care of your loan. This fee is usually only 3/8ths of a percent or so, but the amount adds up. There are companies that service over billions of dollars of home loans. Three-eighths of a percent on a billion dollars is a tidy income.
