Lowell Deeds

Here are the numbers of key documents recorded this August compared to August of 2007 for the entire ten town registry district:

In August 2007, 648 deeds were recorded. In August 2008, just 495, a drop of 24%.
In August 2007, 1311 mortgages were recorded. In August, 2008, just 798, a drop of 39%.

There may be some good news on the foreclosure front, however:

In August 2007, 54 foreclosure deeds were recorded. In August 2008, there were 47, a 13% decline.
In August 2007, 83 orders of notice were recorded. In August 2008, there were 63, a 24% decrease.

Based on a Warren Group report, the Herald today reported that the median sales price for a home in Massachusetts dropped 12.5% this July compared to July of 2007. With tomorrow being the last business day of August, we’ll try to post our August to August comparisons by the end of the day. As for the decline in this region, my preliminary research showed that if a home sale involved a foreclosure somewhere in the process, the decline in price was substantially more than 12.5%, but if there was no foreclosure involved, the decline was less. My study, however, was based on multiple sales of the same property during the past five years which might lead to misleading conclusions given the rapid ascent and equally rapid decline in values during that very period. I have to scrutinize the figures more closely to validate my findings. Those results will come next week.

Google Suggests (yes, that’s a capital “S”)
Suggests what?…
Why whatever it thinks you’re looking for. That’s what.
Google’s latest innovation is called Google Suggests and it is designed to facilitate your Internet searches. Here is an example…Did you ever misspell a word in Google search and get that helpful message “Did you mean_______ ? Well, that won’t happen anymore. Instead, Google Suggest will correct your misspelling as you type (believe me I ned that feeture). And Google Suggest goes beyond just correcting spelling mistakes. Suggest is smart, very smart. Listen to this….As you type, it guesses what it thinks you are looking for, and begins to offer its “suggestions” while you are still typing. It sounds to me like Google has another winner with Google Suggests and it’s up and running right now…check it out.

The www.lowelldeeds.com site has been inaccessible for most of today. We can reach the site through our internal network and it’s working OK by that route, so that tells us that the server that hosts the site is working OK and that the problem is with its connection to the outside world. A number of technical people are working on it. If you’re able to read this, it means the problem has been fixed, at least temporarily. As a long term solution, we’re in the process of transferring our website to a more reliable setup. Unfortunately, since that is a major change, it will take some time to get it done. In the meantime, we will continue troubleshooting the existing setup.

On Wednesday night employees of the Secretary of State’s IT Department will be working on the registry computer system. We do not expect any interruption in service to the public. Last spring we replaced ACS Database Server that was installed in 2001 with a new SAN system. It has more memory, speed and physically it is about one third the size of the old one. The new servers memory is so big it also replaced four other old servers. The
elimination of these emptied three racks in our computer room. One of SEC IT jobs on Wednesday night will be to remove these racks. The new space will be used to store our new Kodak Archive Writer. SEC IT also intends to reorganize the patch cords used to connect the computer drops to the router switches. They were installed poorly way back in 1999. This must be done after hours since it requires disabling every device in the registry.

Last week, the Plymouth County Registry of Deeds began accepting deeds submitted electronically with excellent result, I’m told. Plymouth had launched electronic recording several months ago but had deferred taking deeds until now. Plymouth now joins Middlesex North as full-service electronic recording registries. Hampden County (Springfield) is also accepting documents filed electronically, but it’s my understanding that neither deeds nor mortgages are permitted as of yet. Other registries are inching closer to activating electronic recording systems. While the number of documents we receive electronically varies from day to day, throughout August we were routinely recording more than 20 electronic documents on many days which, with the very slow pace of overall recording activity, would represent more than 10% of our daily volume. As more registries turn on the system, I believe that our volume of e-recordings will rise substantially.

One of the most frequent inquiries I receive from the email link on our website is from those interested in researching house histories. Unfortunately, the Registry of Deeds is more interested in who owns the land and not what is built upon it, so our records are of limited use in that area. Still, inferences can often be drawn. For example, if a lot was purchased for $1000 and then a year later was sold for $5000, you can reasonably conclude that something was built upon it. But to get more precise information about a house’s age and architectual lineage, outside reference sources are needed. Two useful books are “A Guide to Tracing the Genealogy of Your Home” by Sally Light and “Discovering the History of Your House and Your Neighborhood” by Betsy Green is another. The website About.com also has a useful section on house histories.

As the summer winds down so does our pool of interns. We started June with five (four college and one from the Lowell Career Center) and on Monday we’ll be down to one. In the end these interns scanned over 1400 books for us (great job). But I must admit I was hoping to complete around 1600. In my enthusiasm I did not anticipate certain problems we encountered. As I mentioned in earlier posts, record books with grey scale pages caused the biggest problems. Interestingly enough, we run two types of scanners here at the registry…Kodak 2025 and Fujitsu 5650C. The Fujitsu’s are newer, but less much expensive than the Kodaks. Our Kodaks are higher quality machines that handle grey scale pages without a problem. On our Fujitsu’s the density needs to be changed on the Fujitsu. Unfortunately, we only own two Kodaks. We use one for the Record Book Re-scan Project and the other is being used to scan old Registered Land certificates. Good news…in about a month we are going to suspend the Registered Land project for a few months and retrofit the Kodak for use in the Record Book Re-scan Project. This decision was made not based on importance, but on organizational planning.

These days I’m often asked if it’s time to start buying property. Like most questions related to real estate, it’s tough to give a yes or no answer to that one. One observation I am comfortable sharing, however, is that properties that have already undergone the foreclosure process and are now owned by lenders are the best bargains around. A variety of statistics show that homes that have a foreclosure in their recent history sell for an average of 25% less than the price realized at the previous sale. Homes that have sold in non-distressed transactions have seen far less price depreciation (which is one of the reasons I’m hesitant to say overall prices have reached bottom). Today’s Globe has a front page story exploring the bargains that can be had in purchasing recently foreclosed properties. As the story suggests, getting new owners into these troubled houses is the first essential step to stemming the decline and stabilizing neighborhood prices.

“Bigfoot has been found in the Georgia woods and is being held in a cooler at an undisclosed location”. Don’t laugh, this quote is directly from the Washington Post. Could it be real? Has someone finally found the elusive Sasquatch? Well, Mathew Whitton and Rick Dywer say they have. What?, You don’t believe it? They have posted a picture of the deceased beast on searchingforbigfoot.com. Yeah, I went to the site…yeah, I saw the picture. My impression? Visualize this…remember the gorilla in the Eddie Murphy movie, Trading Places? Now, visualize it stuffed into an small ice cream freezer. Yes, this is a bad one. Our successful Bigfoot trackers affectionately named their find, Rickmat (get it…Rick & Mat). Rickmat stands 7’ 7” tall and weighs 500lbs. Dyer and Whitton claim an expert has analyzed Rickmat’s DNA and found three matches…indeterminate, human and possum. Possum? Come on now, that’s a stretch! And if this isn’t enough Dyer and Whitton are heading back to the same Georgia woods to capture a second Sasquatch. Maybe they should just head to Costume R Us…it would be faster.

We’re in the process of modifying this blog to add more features, especially the ability for users to post comments. Overall the site will be more interactive and may have guest columnists. In other web-related developments, we’re still trying to track down the cause of the problems that users have experienced accessing www.lowelldeeds.com. The company that provides our communications link to the internet tested its lines last night and found no problems so we’re still searching for the cause. We also continue to work on the index image program that will make all pre-1976 indexes available online. The initial version that we’ve been testing is very promising and we hope to have a workable version online by mid-September.

The New York Times reports that just prior to the Russian military incursion into neighboring Georgia, many websites belonging to the government of Georgia came under attack from computers across the world. No one knows who exactly launched these attacks. There’s no hard evidence that the Russian government is responsible and the Georgian sites were defaced or altered in a type of electronic graffiti but were not knocked offline which suggests that it was unofficial mischief rather than a coordinated attack from a hostile government. Still, this incident should remind us that with the internet being such an integral part of our everyday lives, attacks on the internet will also be an integral part of warfare - conflict - terrorism in the 21st Century.

Look! Up in the sky, Its a bird, no its a plane…no its Fire Eagle (as of yesterday that is). Fire Eagle is a new location sharing platform being offered by Yahoo. And its Free. Fire Eagle allows you to share your exact location through your cell phone or computer (did I mention it is free?). Why would anyone want to let the world know his/her “exact location”? For one thing because it is free. And it can turn an ordinary application into something extraordinary. Let me give you an example. You’re in Washington DC. You feel like some Italian food for dinner. Log into a “place finding” application. Type in Italian Restaurants and then Fire Eagle tells the application exactly exact where you are, right down to the street…In seconds your computer/phone screen is displaying every Italian Restaurant in the area. Oh, I see, you want/need a little more privacy. Well “the service allows you to authorize just how much information you want to share with the apps” (PC World). And once a month Fire Eagle will send you an email reminding you what you are sharing. I know it all sounds very Orwellian, but it can offer some convenient services.

www.lowelldeeds.com continues to have some problems. The work we performed on our computer system last night confirmed that the problem is not with the computer server that hosts the website. That leaves the line that connects it with the internet as the most likely culprit. We’ve been advising people who call to report problems to use www.masslandrecords.com if the site. We have some long term changes planned for the mechanics of the website - nothing that will be noticeable to users except, perhaps, for more reliable performance.

We’ve been experiencing sporadic outages of the www.lowelldeeds.com site for the past week and overall slow performance. We will be performing some maintenance on the site after hours today which will bring the site down for several hours. It should resume full operations later this evening.