A new vacant property registration ordinance in San Bruno, California will allow lenders and servicers to register their properties on the Mortgage Electronic Registration System (MERS).
San Bruno joins five other cities, three in California, that will begin a pilot program this year to use the MERS to track vacant properties.

Dubbed the MERS Initiative, it is being spearheaded by the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) Vacant Property Registration committee, which is chaired by Safeguard Properties CEO Robert Klein.
The committee is working with local municipalities considering vacant property registration ordinances to use the MERS to track properties. By using the system, national lenders and servicers have a consistent format for registering properties, and municipalities can save money and resources by not having to create and maintain their own databases of properties.
A group of mortgage banking industry corporations and groups like the MBA provided the capital to start the MERS program. Municipalities that choose to allow vacant property registration through the site are given free access to it, and are provided with training to navigate the system.
The MERS database currently contains 60 million loans from 2,500 lenders, and is being expanded to handle increased capacity.