Hello, Patrick

I appreciate your response to my original post. In my case this may mean I'm all done. The way this played out, Direct Title Solutions ended up as two-thirds of my business, and were the very reason I invested in online access to my 3 biggest counties. I may not be able to stay afloat enough to continue investing in that. If that happens, every search I do for anybody means a ride in the car, and we are in very rural area, so the volumes are not that high.

The most disturbing thing is that DTS negotiated my prices down based on that volume, then when they subscribed to online access in my counties, still expected me to do recordings, judgment searches and old deed retrievals (which all required travel to the courthouse), for the same reduced rate, all the while, lying to my face, telling me they did NOT subcribe to the online access.

I also have a business raising Labrador Retriever puppies on my farm, and that business has increasingly become a larger percentage of our family income. In fact, when the bubble first burst in '08, the puppies allowed me to even stay in abstracting at all, when many other independents were forced out with the bulk of their work having vanished. I fugure the puppies give me about a 3-month window to replace the bulk of the work I have lost from DTS before I have to stop paying for online access. It's a daunting prospect.

But I honestly don't see how they're going to get these searches done if nobody is willing to drive to a courtouse for a $20-$25 deed retrieval that they MUST have because the deed is not online, and their office is 4 hours away.