Suffolk County to Offer Subscriber Access to County Clerk Documents over the Web

Suffolk County residents will no longer have to travel 40 miles to the County Clerk's office in Riverhead, NY, to perform title searches for residential and commercial property, do background searches for employment and credit worthiness, or procure other land property documents available from the County Clerk's Office. That's because the County will be the first county in the nation to open subscriber access to its massive records, giving constituents a self-service option any time of the day or night. The system will allow subscribers to extract high-level information through data mining technology instead of relying on third parties to essentially provide the same service at a fee. Subscribers will be able to create a "TRW" credit report for a particular parcel of land in real-time or near real-time.

Peter Schlussler, Director of Information Technology for Suffolk County, describes the self-service option as the Virtual Suffolk County Clerk's Office and highlights that it will be open to the public 24/7/365 from the comfort of their PC stations. Mr. Schlussler is convinced that other counties will follow Suffolk County's lead. "That's because the Virtual County Clerk's Office is a modern necessity, and we need to cater to our constituents. On the operational side, it is instrumental in reducing overall processing cost associated with operations," he explains. "For the Suffolk County Clerk's Office, we anticipate it will generate savings of over $1.5 million annually. RCG Information Technology created a revenue stream that did not exist before. With the new applications, the Suffolk County Clerk's Office was able to reduce costs associated with converting images and data for a cost of roughly 10 cents per image to approximately .2 cents per image, resulting in an overall savings of $1 million in conversion costs."

Today, the County Clerk's system contains more than 16 million documents, and is growing by 30,000 documents every day. This new service will offer subscribers increased search capabilities and "push technology," providing alerts of updated information via e-mail.

Subscriptions will allow users to query available land records databases, such as mortgages, foreclosures, deeds, judgments, Lis Pendens (or notices of pending action), liens, court actions and other related documents. Subscription fees for access to all records start at approximately $30/day. Users will be charged a $0.65 per image download fee. Mr. Schlussler has projected that subscriptions and additional fees could generate in excess of $1 million in the first year, which could offset taxes. This constitutes a 400% ROI for the first year.