Unfortunately Lisa, this has NOTHING to do with being online. Our county is NOT online and has no plans to do so in the immediate future. Apparently what I am learning, from numerous sources, is that companies are buying the data from the county and setting up their own "title plant". Our county has sold our scanned images and microfilm (prior to the year images were scanned)---this we learned straight from Recorder of Deeds. What good is raising your fees going to do when they have the images they need? They do not care whether the information is 100% accurate or not. All it seems they are looking for is whether the customer owns the property and has good credit. Believe me, their whole idea is $$$. They believe the money saved on not ordering searches and doing what they can "inhouse" will offset what will be paid out in bad loan loss.
I have been searching 26 years, I know how to run a business, trust me. This is about technology and $$$. Our big concern as searchers was going online. Now we are finding out, there are plenty of ways around that. The counties are selling the data to companies and they are setting up their own databases according to their needs. Our Recorder told us of other surrounding counties that sell their data. The concern is no longer whether the report is completely correct---it is to save money, and settle on the loan ASAP. As searchers, we thought we were somewhat insulated from losing our jobs to technology---turns out we are WRONG.
There is an article currently on Source of Title with the heading "Title Insiders Discuss the Benefits of Automated Searches". We know our work is superior, unfortunately the banks do not.
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