Lowell Deeds

Back in early August (check out the August 5 blog entry) our computer company modified the search program we use in the registry and on the Internet. The purpose of the change was to allow the search to ignore spaces and punctuation, a very desirable situation. Unfortunately, we paid a price for this change. Previously, the search completely ignored the “start date” when retrieving documents by book and page number. This was significant in Lowell where our name index reaches back to 1976, but our images go all the way to 1950. We could leave the default start date as 1976 (accurately reflecting our name index) while still retrieving older document images without changing the start date. With the “start date” field turned on, however, the only way you could retrieve a pre-1976 image would be to manually change the start date to 1950. Since many of our Internet users are not real estate professionals, we have found that simple works best, so we decided to roll the default start date back to 1950 which would allow all images to be retrieved without the user having to modify the date at all. While we realized that pushing the start date back to 1950 might mislead a user into thinking that was the coverage of our name index, we decided to try out the 1950 default date for a limited period during which we would gauge user feedback. We have now decided to return the start date to 1976, the name index start date. This means that if you want to retrieve an older document image by book and page number, you should change the start date to 1950. Sorry this entry got so long, but I wanted to share with all of you the thought process we followed in this situation. This is also an instance where user comments and feedback would have greatly assisted me in how to handle this tricky situation. Unfortunately, the only feedback I received was indirect and second-hand, so this well-intentioned but ill-advised experiment persisted for longer than it should have.

The front page of today’s New York Times has an interesting story about property insurance. In the late 1990’s, most American insurance companies quietly switched from coverage that guaranteed the replacement of a destroyed home regardless of cost to a similar sounding type of coverage that would only pay the amount stated on the policy plus an additional 20 to 25%. While estimates vary, they all agree that most American homes are underinsured, usually by a substantial amount. One study contends that 64% of American homes are underinsured by an average of 27%. Perhaps one reason why this has not become more of an issue is that few houses are completely destroyed. (Today’s article features a couple whose San Diego-area home was consumed by a wild fire in the fall of 2003). Nevertheless, homeowners have the responsibility to update the amount of their coverage. This is especially important given the substantial increase in real estate values over the past few years. On another topic, thank you to those blog readers who chose to comment on yesterday’s posting. Please take a moment to read the posted comments and to add your own.

Last Friday Register Howe’s blog entry mentioned the project to make indexes available electronically. Many of the index books are in deplorable condition. Some have pages that are falling out, ripped or seriously faded. This has forced us to take those in bad condition off the “public” shelf . These indexes are in the copy department but kept readily available. This helps prevent the loss of pages and further wear. We have tried copying indexes and putting them in office style binders. This only works for a short time (a very short time). The books just get too much use for this solution. Professional rebinding is very expensive. In addition our experience with “sending books out” hasn’t been very good. Most of the books we have professionally rebound do not last long enough to justify the cost. The arrival of electronic indexes will obviously solve this problem and others.

A casual conversation with an old friend this morning launched me on a day-long research and development effort with our old indexes. To put it in context, our computer holds a searchable name index that reaches back to 1976. Before that, you’re stuck using the grantor/granee index books. But since those books have been victims of 30 or more years of hard usage, they’re in tough shape with broken bindings and loose pages. Since there’s no easy, quick, or inexpensive way to add names to the computerized index going back in time, we’ve been searching for a computer-assisted alternative but have not had much practical success. Using the scanned images of the existing paper index books is the most promising approach and that brings me back to today’s conversation. The end result was that we tried converting a few of the old index images to Adobe Acrobat documents with considerable success. More experimentation is needed, but I predict we’ll have a practical, inexpensive way to search pre-1976 indexes within the next few weeks. Stay tuned.

I sold real estate for ten years before coming to the Registry of Deeds. In both roles I have found that people in general are fascinated by real estate. For some it’s just curiosity about what a house sold for (especially the neighbor’s). Others want to make a fortune using the get rich quick techniques shown on late night television. At some point in my life I have been guilty of both (no, I never bought the tapes, honest). For this reason I still find a little bit of statistics intriguing. I hope you feel the same. Associated Press is reporting that Condominium prices in Massachusetts hit and all time high in July. According to the Massachusetts Association of Realtors median condo prices soared to $269,000. That figure is an increase of 14.7% from July 2003. Single family home prices are up 11% from last July but down 2.9% from last month. Over all, home prices are dramatically from 2003 but seem to have leveled off in June and July. Whether these trends continue is the subject for a future blog.

Yesterday an experienced registry user asked for help finding a document from the Department of Veterans Affairs. He knew the document existed (he even had the book and page number) but he wasn’t able to find it by doing a name search in our computerized index. Since the adoption of the Massachusetts Deed Indexing Standards back on January 1, 2000 (click here to see the indexing standards), that name should appear in the index as “USA Veterans Affairs.” Prior to the adoption of the indexing standards, it’s much more difficult to predict how that name would have been indexed. In our index, we have a 1999 entry of “Veterans Affairs Secretary of” and a 1999 entry of “Veterans Administration.” Back in 1988, a document was indexed two ways: “Secretary Department of Veterans Affairs” and “United States of America Department of Veterans Affairs.” This all might seem a little boring to those of you who don’t make a living doing run downs at the registry of deeds, but for those of you that do, this is the kind of thing that might keep you awake at night. For the latter group, I have some suggestions. Become very familiar with the Deed Indexing Standards. If you spend a lot of time at a particular registry, try to determine if that registry follows the indexing standards. If the registry doesn’t, bring it to someone’s attention. For index entries prior to 2000, try to discover how the registry indexed certain names back then. Unfortunately, no one that I know of kept very good records of how indexing was done historically and it usually differed from registry to registry (sometimes it was even different within the same registry). Make maximum use of the search capabilities of the computer system. Specifically, our computer searches for what you’ve typed plus anything else that begins with the letters you’ve typed. So if you just type “USA” you’ll get every possible combination of names that begins with the letters “USA.” If the search returns too many results, then you can narrow your search. When searching, always remember, start with a broad search - you can always narrow it if necessary.

Today is my first day back from a week long vacation. My wife, who is a tax collector, takes professional improvement courses every August at the University of Mass in Amherst. I usually tag along because I love the area. She goes to school and I well…don’t. Although this year I added a little work to my trip. Since Middlesex North will soon be doing E recording I took a class on Electronic Tax Payments. The course objective, which was sponsored by UniBank, was to demonstrate that doing business online is the future. I found it interesting that E recording and Electronic Tax Payments share many similar issues. Consumer confidence and concern for security are just two of these. UniBank sited the popularity of ATM’s as proof that the public has taken the “leap of faith” to the online world. I sat with my wife during the class. Of course, she elbowed me every time I whispered to her “we do that at the registry”.
Of course, no trip to Amherst is complete without dropping in to the Jones Library. This historic library has two wonderful displays on former Amherst residents, poets Robert Frost and Emily Dickerson. I have been to the library before, but this trip was especially thrilling. On display was the original manuscript of Frost’s poem “Stopping By A Wood On A Snowy Evening”. Amazingly, the masterpiece is written on a lined piece of paper ripped out of a composition notebook. After staring at it for ten minutes the librarian asked me to move back before I fogged up the glass case. I was hooked. Now I had to find the house Frost lived in when he taught at Amherst College. Success…It is a beautiful Victorian located at 43 Sunset St (the perfect name for a poet’s house). I slowly drove by it… I slowly drove by it again…I slowly drove by it for a third time. As I turned my car around for the fourth swing my wife (the tax collector) said “let me out…you are going to get arrested for stalking and I’m not going to jail with you. My reponse is best explained this way…“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood and I took the one “MOST” traveled by”…I headed back to the hotel.

Welcome to the Middlesex North Registry of Deeds Blog. For those unfamiliar with the term, “blog” is short for web log, an online journal about a particular topic - in this case, the registry of deeds. Sometimes we write about specific things that happen here in Lowell but often we discuss items that will have an impact on everyone who is involved in the real estate business such as electronic recording, changes in state-wide registry policies and proposed legislation. But this is the registry of deeds, after all, so some days there are no startling new developments to report. That’s when the blog ventures into other areas. If you’re a first time reader, please take a few minutes to glance through the archives to get a sense of how this all works. And please, we’d like this to be a dialogue, not a monologue, so take advantage of the comment feature. The Internet works best when it’s interactive. We look forward to hearing from you.

We hope you enjoy the blog’s new look. The changes aren’t major: a new font for the type, a different appearance for the “archive” section, and a place for a title for each posting. The new website is almost complete, as well, but some fine tuning remains to be done. The roll out date will be sometime on Monday afternoon. If you subscribe to Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, check out the edition that comes out on Monday. There’s supposed to be an article on our blog. The reporter asked if I knew of any other registry that had a blog. I don’t. If you do know of one (or of any other blog related to real estate that might interest our readers), please send me its name.

We’re redesigning our website. The visual appearance of the new version will be very different. The link to our database that most users employ to search for and retrieve documents will still have a prominent place, but the link will take you to the www.masslandrecords.com site. Once there, you just have to select Middlesex North from the drop down menu of counties and then you’re in business. The reason for this change is that many of our users continue to have problems using the current link that brings you directly to our search page. There’s something about the design of that link at the ACS end that just doesn’t work for some computers (and since ACS hasn’t figured out how to fix it in the past six months, there’s little reason to think that they’ll fix it in the future). The other big change is that the blog will now appear on the main page of the website. This should expose more readers to it and might make it more likely that more of you will use the blog comment feature. Other than that, we’re trying to make the layout of the rest of the site more logical and easier to follow. If all goes well, the new website should be on the air by close of business tomorrow, so please check it out.

Today I traveled to UMass Amherst to speak at the annual school of the Massachusetts Collectors and Treasurers Association. My class is called “The Collector and the Register of Deeds.” The students in this year’s class were particularly attentive given our early morning start time. I gave a PowerPoint presentation that showed how the registry’s computers work now and how the electronic recording system will work. In my opinion, local tax collectors are prime candidates for electronic recording. They will be able to use Level 3 electronic recording which is a more sophisticated method than I’ve described in earlier blog entries (that’s Level 2). Level 3 electronic recording means there’s no paper document involved. Instead, the electronic recording system can be “mapped” to whatever software the tax collector’s office uses to generate documents like tax takings. Using their own software, tax collectors will generate documents electronically and transmit them to the registry via the electronic recording system. At some point, paper copies may be produced, but it’s not necessary.

Electronic recording has the potential to revolutionize the way local attorneys do conveyancing. In a typical transaction today, the buyers, sellers, and brokers all meet at the lawyer’s office, documents are signed, and someone brings the documents to be recorded to the registry of deeds. A final rundown is done and the documents go on record. Only then are the funds released. Then it’s a long wait to recieve the original documents from the registry. Electronic recording will make this entire process much more efficient. The parties will still gather at the lawyer’s office, but once the documents are signed, the lawyer and her staff can complete the entire transaction in a matter of minutes without ever leaving the office. First, they would use their own desktop scanner to create electronic images of the documents to be recorded. Next, information about those documents would be entered into a secure, web-based user interface. Then, the lawyer would do a quick rundown using the registry’s website which is continuously updated with newly recorded documents. If the title remains free and clear, the lawyer simply clicks on the “send” button and the electronic package of document images and data zip across the Internet to a registry recording terminal. The registry clerk will verify the images to make sure they are legible, will verify that the data that has been entered (names and addresses, mostly) is accurate, and will click the “record” button. Those documents are now on record. The attorney will immediately receive via the Internet a receipt showing the time of recording, book and page number and recording fee of each document. The lawyer will also receive an electronic image of the recorded document complete with all recording information on it. Before the seller is done telling the buyer which day the garbage is collected, you’re on record with a receipt and a copy of the recorded document. The originals have never left your custody. Maybe it’s difficult to envision this without seeing the system in operation. We’re working on some modifications to our website that will include a PowerPoint-type presentation on the new system. Stay tuned to the blog for more information on electronic recording.

Electronic recording is following an academic schedule - it took the summer off. We had a lot of activity back in May, thoroughly testing the system and demonstrating it for some potential users, but then things went on hold. Well summer vacation is just about over and electronic recording activity has resumed. We hope to have the system ready for regular, live recordings around the 1st of October. There are really two portions of the electronic recording system: the reception function and the submitter interface. When we purchased the ACS computer system several years ago, we paid for the electronic reception function as part of the overall purchase, so that’s what we’ll be using. We’ve tested it and it works very well. It will allow incoming electronic documents to merge seamlessly with paper documents recorded the traditional way. The ACS submitter interface is a different story. This is the Internet-based program that users will employ to send documents to the registry. The ACS model is a generic, nationwide one that will probably work very well for big mortgage companies that send us bunches of mortgages or discharges through the mail. In my opinion, however, the ACS submitter interface will be relatively difficult to use for the average Massachusetts conveyancing attorney. I’ll try to state the basis of my opinion in coming blog entries. The good news is that ACS will not have a monopoly on the submitter side. Competing programs produced by other companies will also be able to submit documents electronically (just like your cell phone with Verizon service can communicate easily with my AT&T Wireless phone). With competition, the market will decide which system works best for Massachusetts users, and that’s the way it should be. So if you know anyone who owns an Electronic Document Recording Company, have them give me a call. It might be a great business opportunity.

In other parts of the county, property taxes are assessed and collected by county government. Consequently we get a lot of calls each day from people seeking tax information about particular properties. Up until now, we’ve only been able to explain that the treasurer or tax collector for the town in which the property is located is the person with that information and suggest that the caller find the telephone number by dialing information. That doesn’t seem particularly helpful, though, so we are compiling a list of the telephone number of the tax collector’s office for every city and town in Massachusetts. We should have it done sometime next week and will post it on our website so that everyone will have access to it. On another topic, we’re starting to replace some of the computers around the registry. Most of the ones we’re using now were purchased back in 1999 with money that was available for Y2K preparations. While these machines seem to work fine, most people in the computer industry suggest replacing computers every two years - three at the most - due to rapid changes in technology. We’ve decided to start replacing a few of ours at a time so our entire inventory of machines doesn’t become obsolete at the same time. Regarding the older machines, our users have been kind in not complaining about the appearance (and feel?) of the keyboards. The combination of oily residue from the many fingers that touch the keys and the dust and grit that’s constantly in the air in this old building make for some grungy keyboards. We’re going to make a determined effort to keep the keyboards and monitors cleaner than we have in the past. Maybe this is one reason all the new keyboard are black and not the traditional tan - the dirt doesn’t show as much.

If this year’s budget permits will are considering scanning the 1131 remaining Recorded Land books. This would mean that all Record Land documents from 1855 (the year the registry opened) to present would be available to the public in an electronic format. The images will be accessible on the internet as well as the registry. The images will be retrieved by scanning archival microfilm of the books. The microfilm is 100′ 35 mm, a medium which is no longer used. Even though we have the abililty to scan 35mm in-house, it is difficult and time consuming. We usually prefer to do work in-house, but in this case there is no question that it is cost effective to use an outside vendor. As with any conversion we expect a percentage of missing and bad images. In fact we are still finding them from the initial ACS conversion. This is not really unusual considering we have approximately 6 million images scanned.
If at any time you find a missing or bad image be sure to let us know. Feel free to call or email.