AUTOMATED REAL ESTATE TITLE SEARCH RAMPS UP
February 11, 2005
Inman News

Automated title search companies are dragging one of the last bastions of time-consuming manual data retrieval – the title search process – into the 21st century.

"If the property falls into the location and timeline covered under this system, we can get that title done within 12 hours, as opposed to what would take three or four days to do manually in many states," said Monte Jiran, director of operations for Equity Settlement Services, a client of automated title search services provider RealtyData.

"This is the way things are going. The only question is at what speed," Jiran said.

"In areas RealtyData doesn't cover, we have to send an examiner to the county clerk's office to do research on a property and compile the information. Then we have to re-type it into another report," said Jiran, describing the traditional process.

"With RealtyData, you touch a few keys, it's in readable format and we're much more responsive to our clients. Not to mention, it's less costly," the director of operations said.

"Automating of the title search is really catching on. It speeds up the whole closing process and reduces some of the costs," said Veida Dehmlow, partnership management officer of the Independent Community Bankers of America Mortgage.

"It's one small part of that big picture of trying to reduce settlement costs. Title is a pretty expensive part of settlement charges," Dehmlow said. She said the automated service could also be seen as part of the move toward the paperless real estate transaction, though "there's still a long way to go."

Companies such as RealtyData and Zenodata Corp., both of which offer automated title search as core products, and companies offering the service along with others, such as Attorneys' Title Insurance Fund, are proliferating. Their clients are national vendors, large title agents and title insurance companies. Zenodata boasts Home Focus, which is Bank of America's title business subsidiary, Chesapeake, a subsidiary of Citigroup, GreenLink, Wachovia's title subsidiary, Title Underwriters and about 50 other clients on its client list.

"We enter the data ourselves. We check the data as we enter it," said Bob Anastasi, executive vice president of Zenodata. His company is creating its own database.

To create the database, Zenodata produces high-resolution images from the original county documents. A proprietary conversion process then extracts all relevant information, creating a database with more than 75 fields cross-indexed by physical location, names and document references.

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