Reducing copy fees is the title company's current crusade. Two approaches are:
(1) Not paying above county costs. What about our time/parking/E&O, etc.? The solution for the searcher is to raise their labor charge. When taken to task about this, I asked a state-away client "How much above my price would it cost to send one of your employees here to copy one will?" There are hundreds of online searchers, but only a few on the ground in any given county.
(2) Pay One Price Searches. This is a trap. I have agreed to this for Last Owner Searches with a narrow range of copies: current deed(s), significant pages of mortgages and assignments. The trap is Sixty Year Searches with copies of all documents: the entire deed chain and all Easements and Restrictions. I agreed once, and received search requests for the four largest condo and PUD subdivisions in the county. For $200 each, I would have spent a week fetching nearly a thousand copies per order and loosing $400+/order in the process. Clearly, no searcher will agree to this.
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