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Good Deeds

The centuries-old method of recording property documents is evolving.

The process of recording county property documents hasn't seen significant change since long before man eschewed the horse as the primary means of transportation.

But change is on the horizon, and processes that once took hours can now be completed in seconds. A recent pilot project in Thurston County, Wash., demonstrated how a county auditor's office could simplify the recording process using an electronic recording system.

The pilot involved electronically recording reconveyance documents using a system designed by Ingeo Systems Inc. A reconveyance document is a one to two page document that releases a deed of trust, e.g. a paid mortgage.

Reconveyance documents are not time sensitive and don't necessarily call for such a system, but other processes, such as getting a deed of trust reported in time to meet a lender's deadline or a buyer/seller deadline, will benefit from the system, according to Ann McLaren, assistant vice president of Transnation Title Insurance Company in Olympia, which participated in the project.

"Eventually, when we are able to take those time-sensitive documents and record them electronically there will be a huge benefit," she said. "We are scrambling all the time to get a deed of trust reported to meet those deadlines."

McLaren said there have been occasions when a document needed to be delivered across town at the 11th hour but missed the deadline because of the time spent negotiating traffic and standing in line. An electronic recording system would eliminate those steps.

"I like the part of the program where work is being passed on yet nobody is getting up and running around tracking somebody down," she said. "Every time someone has to get up from their desk and find someone, that's wasting time."

How It Works
The process of recording a property document once meant that county auditor staff would have to physically check the piece of paper for the legally required margins and information, manually log it into the computer, print out a label for each page, scan the document, return the document in the mail, index the scanned pages and repeat the process for verification.

The estimated time of completion, excluding delays, is two to four hours. In contrast, the new electronic process takes a little more than a minute.

The new process begins at the title company, where staff accesses a template of a document and electronically fills in the information. The document is then electronically signed, digitally notarized and electronically transmitted to the courthouse and the county auditor's office. In Thurston County, Ingeo provides the front-end software, which works in conjunction with the county's recording system in checking the digital signature, charging the fee, indexing the document and sending the document back to the title company.

"It reduces the amount of time staff has to spend processing these documents, standing at the counter, handling paper and doing all the steps to make it a recorded document and then also the indexing and putting it into our system," said Kim Wyman, Thurston County auditor. "We're hoping over time that this catches on and we can eliminate paper documents. We record hundreds of thousands of pages a year. That's a lot of paper."

Progressive County
It took a progressive county like Thurston in a progressive state to tinker with a centuries-old process.

The idea germinated when then Thurston County recording manager Lisa Goldsworthy was at a national conference and ran into a couple of representatives from Ingeo. "One thing led to another and we said we'd be interested in pursuing electronic document recording," Goldsworthy said.

Thurston County was ideal for the pilot for a couple of reasons. First, the state had already passed legislation giving digital signatures and digital documents the same legal weight as paper signatures and documents. Second, the county was already processing documents electronically.

"Somebody who is already doing that kind of work really is in a good position to begin accepting electronic recording," said Mike Morgan, Ingeo's director of marketing communications. "At that point, it's simply a matter of setting up an interface for a new type of data; rather than [having] to key it in themselves, we set up an interface and it feeds the data directly into their system."

But getting the county's existing software system to integrate with Ingeo's system took some work. The original recording system was developed by Eagle Computer Systems, which supports Ingeo's hardware and software. Ingeo and Eagle Systems worked closely to pull off the pilot.

"One of the biggest things we learned is that it takes longer than you might think," Morgan said. "A lot of it was not the time it took to get the work done, it was the coordination of the work between the multiple entities. We did some work on our product, and the back-end vendor [Eagle Systems] had to do some on their product to make the two talk to each other."

Another unforeseen challenge involved the county's firewalls. The auditor's office server and recording system is connected to the county's network. Giving Ingeo access to the network raised some questions among the county's IT employees.

"We had a number of security issues that our tech people wanted to make sure we addressed," Wyman said. "We had to make sure that the county network wasn't compromised and that our network wasn't compromised."

Once things fell into place, the county produced more than 200 legal transactions to complete the pilot. Now the county is ready to adopt the system completely. "The only negative things we heard from the title companies were on the business end, like, 'the digital signature is very expensive for a small title company to pay for,'" Wyman said. "For a big bank, a couple of hundred dollars is not much for a digital signature, but when you're talking about a five or six-person title company, that's a big investment."
The auditor's office is now looking for price quotes on a similar system. The plan is to go live some time this year.

According to McLaren, the main stumbling block for wide deployment of such a system is the digital signature. "All of our buyers and sellers would have to have an electronic signature for this to work and they don't right now," she said. McLaren envisions escrow companies and title companies using the signature pad device that UPS and department stores use to sign electronic documents.

"It would be a huge benefit to the industry," she said.