After David's message about the Kinko's I did the old V-8 commercial where I hit my head with the palm of my hand and said "I could've gone to Kinko's".  Speaking of Kinko's, I just got a corporate email from MaryKay (I'm a consultant www.marykay.com/dgrady1 ) where Kinko is giving us a discount copy card to use in our MaryKay business.  Maybe NALTA could look into that for all their members.

 Normally I get one or two requests at a time for a full copy of a mortgage.  In my area, a full copy with riders can run  40 pages or more.  The requests always ask that you search for assignments on the particular mortgage that they are requesting.  Which means that technically you are doing a title search because if the person has more than one mortgage it is likely that he could have assignments on each mortgage so each document has to be searched same as if a title search is being done.  So I have always thought that assignment searching is time consuming and I have felt that aspect of the request is a freebie.  Most of the time I do not find an assignment.  Am I hearing right that I should charge another $15.00 fee if an assignment is found?

I charge $15.00 for the mortgage only plus the $.25 county copy fee for copying both the mortgage and the assignment if one is found.  If the mortgage is 20 or less pages I make the copies off of my own printer.  Then I can fill the request order from home.  If it is 20+ pages, I copy it at the Registry.  No, I have never figured out the cost of ink and wear and tear on my equipment per copy so I just charge the same as the county.  I believe that charging extra for copies is valid though because it covers your time to wait on the machine to copy.  I used to charge more for copies when I was in SC and no one (company, VM) complained because I had no competition there.  Not so here. 

Let me break down what came across with this request.   They called me and said that they were sending over 10 request for full copies of mortgages would I do them for $10.00 each instead of the $15.00.  I agreed.  I think on my original contract with them, I stated that I would not discount but they got me at a weak moment.  So then the next day they called and said we have 8 more in your area would you just do them for the $10.00 fee since you already have 10 others from us.  So I was getting ready to go on vacation and I thought okay $180.00 plus copies will be good to make up for being off that week.  And like I said, then reality set in.  The copies were $35.00.  It took about 3 1/2 hours to look them up, copy them and check for assignments. Then if the delivery had not taken four hours my profit margin would have been excellent.  Still as Lisa pointed out, I made $22.00 an hour which was only good.    And again, I am not complaining about the request, I only needed suggestions and ideas on a better way to deliver.  Which you all gave me, thanks guys.

Next time I will take them to Kinko's use my MaryKay discount card and have Kinko's email the documents to me so I can forward the email to the company.  Simple.