Hello,

My name is Nathan Miller, I am one of the owners of Court Street USA and I feel to address some of the points here but first a short background for those of you who don't know me or my company. CSUSA was founded by a small group of friends who all have professional abstracting experience and who all care about other abstractors being treated well. We actually care a lot so these kinds of posts are disturbing. We have been very outspoken at many title association events about how bad abstractors are treated. For example, last year we approached ALTA at multiple venues to ask that they specifically state that paying abstractors on time for services is one of the "ALTA Best Practices". That didn't go anywhere, but we tried. Over the past 20 years I have personally travelled to and searched in hundreds of counties in multiple states and I've made many abstracting friends in the process. We have worked for the majority of clients out there, including many of the bad ones, so we know the pain of being paid late, not being paid at all, being short paid and being shorted on copies or 2nd trip fees (when the need for a 2nd trip was not our fault). In short, we understand the frustrations of getting paid in this industry.

What is totally shocking to me is how anyone could even remotely suggest that we are not a good company to work for. There are hundreds of abstractors that get paid in full, on time, every single month, and we've never once not paid for something that we legitimately owed. We've never even been late on a payment. I can remember several times approving payment when we had a legitimate dispute over a bill, but there was at least some grey area we could use to side with the abstractor, so we paid their bill in full. In 17 years of business we have outsourced over 1,000,000 good paying title searches to over 1000 independent abstractors all over the country. We pay fast, we stay loyal as long as we can (that part is usually up to the abstractor) and we even like and respect what you do, unlike some VMC's... so if anyone is saying something bad about CSUSA they must not know us very well. That's the first thing I want people to know. Our goal was and still is to be the most abstractor friendly VMC out there so to that end we paid 100% of our bills every 2 weeks for many years in the beginning until we grew so much that we had to push that back to paying every 30 days. To be clear, we pay once a month on a set schedule like clockwork, paying for all orders completed about 2 weeks prior to checks being mailed, so it’s actually even better than standard Net 30 where payment is made for orders completed 30 to 60 days ago. With CSUSA you will be paid monthly for all orders completed roughly 14 to 30 days ago.

CSUSA does not set your fees, you do. You have free will to accept our terms or not. If you received an order from us then you agreed with your signature to follow terms as set forth in our engagement package. One of those terms is that we will only pay what the county charges for copies. We also put that directly on the order form so you see it with each order as a reminder. The terms are clear and up front. You had the choice to accept the orders or not. If you want to make your own terms and cross out/markup on our engagement package as suggested by someone above that is totally fine and then we can decide if we want to agree or not to your terms. We might and we might not. What I can tell you is if you set your fees so that they are competitive with other abstractor’s total fees in your county and you don't add on to your copy fees we are a great client to work for.

Scott, I'm sorry you had this experience but I think you should definitely work for us if that was the only issue. You might have to raise your search fee if you had too low of a search fee and compensated that with profit on copies, but make sure you stay competitive. We value the relationship and don’t want to lose it.

Karen, I would be more than happy to discuss this with you in more detail offline but I think you would change your opinion of us if you understood what we will and will not pay for and how clear we tried to be upfront about it. For the public record on SOT I need to state here a few facts because a lot of people will and have read your negative comments. First of all, your SOT post claims that CSUSA shorted you "HUNDREDS" of dollars but your email to us stated you were shorted just "$72.50". The reason you were "shorted" on copy fees is because you sent us lots of copies we clearly did not ask for. We did explain all of this on an order by order basis in an email to you as we always do when there is an issue. Using the Auto Mechanic example used above, it would be like picking up your car at the mechanic and they handed you a bill that was $72.50 more than they quoted. Then they tell you they put some extra parts in the trunk just in case you needed them in the future. Of course, you refuse to pay the $72.50 for the extra parts you didn't need or request but then they post something bad about you personally on social media where everyone can see it saying that you ripped them off "HUNDREDS" of dollars. Now they have said something about you not only untrue but exaggerated to sound worse than it really was. Our order form states very clearly and in great detail what pages we want from each type of document you might find. If we ask for a few pages and receive a full copy we can't pay for that, and neither will our clients.

Many of our abstractors have been working with us for more than a decade and send us letters telling us how grateful they are for the relationship.

If you want a new good paying client please sign up at www.courtstreetusa.com. We vend work nationwide. In my opinion, good abstractors are the most valuable player in the entire home transfer process. We need good abstractors and good abstractors need clients like CSUSA.

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