George,

Yes, I do indeed get $120 and more for current owner searches in distant counties and I do a lot of them. In this case, it wasn't a current owner search but a corporation search for possible liens, judgments and pending cases.

Many clients are willing to pay for a service they know will be done accurately and quickly no matter how remote the county. My clients know they can rely on us for this kind of service.

220 miles round trip is not uncommon for Davick Services. I remember one two-day project a couple of years ago that took me from Lubbock to El Paso and then along the back roads from El Paso to Austin (stopping at almost every county along the way and finally returning to Lubbock. The round trip mileage for that trip was over 1300 miles.This particular project really very simple. I was tracking an oil pipepline and the company needed to check for one particular document in each of the counties. It didn't matter if the document was on file or not, they just needed to know for certain. The searches were simple but the project was extremely time sensitive and critical for my vendor manager's lawyer customer.

At other times, I've traveled as far as five hundred miles round trip to file a single document. My client didn't mind paying the $500 I charged. Their client stood to lose hundreds of thousands if the document wasn't filed on time.

Sometimes, I'm able to string these trips together so that I can do several searches for different clients along the way. Because we are able to receive orders while en route we are often able to route on the fly. Last Thursday for example I started out with just one order in a county that is 120 miles awsy. I left early in the morning so that I was there when the county opened. By the time I returned to my car there was another order for a county about sixty miles southwest of the first. Along the way I received two orders that I was able to do on the way home by routing only about 40 miles out of the way. One of my clients received their order back in just under two hours from the time they sent it.

It isn't always this good but last Thursday was a good example of how good on demand mobile abstracting and records research can be both for myself and my clients.

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