I can't speak for every county because my searches were all done nationwide, so we generalized to make pricing easy. Basically the abstractors would charge us for the search and copy costs, but the amount of copies they charged us for depended on what kind of search it was. Mortgage/assignment search we'd get charged whatever the copy cost was (with a slight discount on volume orders). Current owners the abstractor would include a full copy of the deed in their search price and we paid for any additional copies we requested in addition to the deed. As for what we charged clients, that also depended on the client. Some were a flat fee that included the copy price because they were only requesting first/legal/recording of the mortgage and first page of assignments. Others decided they would rather have a lower upfront fee and pay copies, so we had a flat fee for them and passed along whatever the copy cost was from the abstractor. In my experience, I've found that if you charge copies it helps when you negotiate with new clients because then you don't have to try to guesstimate how many copies each document is going to have and how that is going to help/hurt your profit margin.

Hope that helps!

- Amanda

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