Robert:

It seems you'd be surprised that most of the returned abstracts that we receive outside of our own internal abstracting network never include tax information. For insurance purposes, it is our (title company) responsibility to obtain a written tax certification from the municipality. Many lenders will require to review a Municipal Lien Certificate or Tax Certification from the tax authority where the property is located. Some will accept title company created "Tax Sheets or Tax Certifications".

In some areas of PA, tax collectors work 1 hour per day, 2 days per week or they only work after "normal" title company hours. Obviously, with that schedule, the collectors receive a huge volume of calls when they are working. That leads to busy signals or numerous messages being left. It can take 3 weeks just to reach these people unless you know their process and hours of operation. Upon reaching a live person, they'll say send me a check and I'll return via mail. We do everything via Fed EX overnight to speed uo the process.

Tax information is not a part of public record unless a lien is placed upon the property for delinquent tax payments. Even then, that amount pulled will not be accurate with the per diem interest counties place upon the liens. Liens being placed against a property doesn't happen early or often here either. We closed a file last week that had 4 years of delinquency for School and Local taxes with over a 11K balance that wasn't a part of public record.

Most abstractors won't go that far to pay for a lien certificate up front, especially since many of them aren't being paid in the first place by many title companies. It seems to work much better when we do it ourselves.

Thanks.

Jason