Then the mortgage is quickly sold off, the money recouped, so they can go and originate another mortgage.
At any given time, they hold a very small fraction of all the mortgages they might originate in a years (in this example $10B at year).
It seems very strange, and terrible for borrowers, that you can form a contract with one entity, and then have it transferred to another without your agreement. From what i've heard, those transfers aren't purely formalities either, people get hit with weird charges sometimes.
This describes the US system as well. The 'servicing' (who you pay each month) of the loan might change hands, but the underlying debt was bundled and sold off already. In the US, many banks don't service loans. I assume, that "Fund X" buys the securities using funds from 401ks, etc, and they kick the servicing to a preferred partner. The partner gets paid some cut. The fund gets the yield, the fees are paid out to to the servicing entity.
This is why the 2008 event was so disruptive. Mortgage brokers were labeling everything as AAA, and the funds were buying them up. Banks weren't risking their own capital, they want the 401k holders to own the debt, and they just take their cut. It's a nice racket, can't figure out how to break in, though.
It's an incredibly tightly regulated system, and the buyer of the debt is still subject to the exact same contractual obligations that the originator had.
You're basically asking, why do retail stores exist? Why don't people go shop directly from the central distribution warehouse?
Exactly. Retail stores basically don't exist (or are in a clear downward trend) for the same reasons. People realizing they don't add value and they can just buy their stuff directly.
It's the same here, how does quicken loans add value? They do something the people they sell the loan to can't? Not really, it's just marketing. Quicken loans has built a marketing funnel, they get the loans, then sell them. The value they add is marketing.
It is possible to find mortgage loans that are not resold, but you may pay for the privilege (or get a 10 year loan, those are short enough that they're often not worth reselling).
The first offered bi-weekly payments, the second didn't. So you aren't even guaranteed the same "features".