In a lot of the counties in the Philadelphia area, the records are sufficiently computerized in-house and on-line for enough offices that a last owner search can be done in 10 to 15 minutes, not including the time to fax and bill the work. This isn’t true of all of the counties, but the one I work in has seen prices kept well below $25 for last owner searches. These cheaper searches are for credit searches and the like, so the emphasis is on having a fast turn-around time and a low price. An agent would be insane to use them for insuring titles since quite often the accuracy rate drops with the high volume of work these searchers do (30 to 60+ a day). However, I do know some agents are using these in the hope of squeezing a few extra dollars out of each deal.

Most searchers tend to charge $25 to $50 for an LOS, but they keep their clients through a combination of solid work and having the ability to be available all the time to answer questions, especially the more complicated questions concerning things that the agents who have never done searches might not understand. Also, most searchers can make a living limiting themselves to one county so they don’t have a lot of the extra hassles that come with working multiple counties.

Many of our counties have been computerized for decades, so we’re seeing a newer phenomenon that is likely to affect counties that have only been computerized for less than 10 years. I guess it could be called “technological regression.” This is where some counties regress from being well-computerized and on-line to having systems that are not available on-line or that have been messed with by the County’s IT department or vendors to the point where they are not trusted. I think the searchers in these counties have had it quite bad since they lowered their prices when computerization made the work quick and now that the downward pricing pressure has been applied, they are having trouble raising their prices to adjust for the longer time it is now taking them to complete their work.

To add to all of this, the PA Supreme Court has recently interpreted state law to conclude that recording a document is sufficient to provide notice of the contents of the document regardless of whether the index entry is mistaken or completely missing from the record.


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