My pleasure, Charles. The first step is to find out if closings can be performed within your state by notaries public. Some states require an attorney to close. Others require a title producer's license. You need to find out Ohio's law. You need to get a notary's commission from your secretary of state's office. It usually is not very expensive.

Before you apply for the commission you should do a search of your area to determine how many notaries are in your area that present competition. You can do that by going to Notary Rotary and searching the number of notary signing agents within 50-75 miles of your location. At that point you will have to make a determination as to whether your area is overly saturated.   If so, you can make a choice of either accepting what income you can get from your area in addition to your your abstracting, or selecting a neighboring area with less competition in which to perform closings. Right now a lot of the competition from the low ball signing agents is falling by the wayside because of the current market condition. Also the no pay/slow pay scam artist signing services are starting to go out of business. As evolution teaches us...only those strong enough to adapt to change will survive.

Once you have made a decision as to whether you want to perform notary signing services, you need to drum up business. You can do this by registering on Notary Rotary either as a standard member or as a premium member. Once you sign up you will have a list of title companies and signing services that you can contact to receive work. You will need to sign up with a large number of them. There are other sites also with whom you can sign up.

How do the closings impact on your abstracting prices? Well, the way we do it is to link the abstract price to the closing. If the title company contacts us for abstracting work and wants a discount price...they have to give us the closing also. Otherwise they pay our standard price. If they don't like the arrangement they can go elsewhere.

It is easy to determine if a title company welches on the deal and negotiates the discount price, but does not deliver on the closing. Simply check the land records within 30-60 days following the title search. If a different notary closed the deal you have the option of cutting the client loose for future work and/or suing the client for contract breach.

Hope this helps.