The information I received is from a company we own in Winnebago county.  The manager of that office told me in a meeting this morning about this situation.  His searchers do go to the courthouse, but they use their own computer there.  They pay for access to the same system that the county uses for their records, in order to have the convenience of not waiting in line for an open computer.  If they wanted to use the computers with the usual copy costs, our turnaround would be much longer as there are 4 computers with about 25 searchers fighting for access.  This is their primary county, so they have several searches every day.  If it was a matter of a couple searches a day, I'm sure he would have his searchers use the county's computers.

When searching, we look at all mortgages from vesting deed forward and check the satisfactions to be sure they match up.  I'm working on a current owner right now that has 9 satisfied mortgages and 3 open mortgages, so they would have to look at at least 2 pages from each mortgage and 1 or 2 pages on each sat.  That's $5 or $6 per mortgage, plus all the open documents.  On open mortgages, I would need to look at at least 3 pages each, assuming the searcher can guess which page the loan amount may be on.  Some current owner searches may go back 20 or more years and include many E&R's to add on top of this. 

I guess it's sort of a catch-22.  We can either pay all this extra money for convenience and to keep our turnaround time up, or I can pay people to basically stand in line all day to avoid paying copy costs, and risk not being able to adhere to the turnaround requirements.