LSI was a good customer back in the day when Rich Snedden was running it. Back than he was reachable and the staff workable as all including the examiner realized that it took all to work together to put together a good quality package. Most out of state companies now are hard to work with as the staff of those companies have little say so in how the work is done.

 Vendor mangament came into the picture and things changed. It all became about the price and how low the examiner can be forced to bring their price down. Competition grew due to more people claiming to be examiners coming into the industry and agreeing to do the work for less. Quality of the product was pushed farther down the list of needs. That inturned forced those with knowledge to reduce the price or lose the account.

 Along with vendor management came the GATOR system tracking prices and turn around time, giving no thought to the most 2 impotatnt facts. First, that  no 2 counties are the same as to what is required to produce an abstract. Secondly, no 2 states are the same as to cost of living and the cost to produce an abstract. By utilizing Gator companies were able to push price cuts and go to auto billing.

 When autobilling first came out you could review their invoice and if descrepancies were find you were able to speak to your rep and get matters taken care of easily. Not so anymore very time consuming between reviewing and trying to get corrected so one gets paid for the product.

  Along with the above came the requirement of the examiner to have to puchase E&O insurance, further driving up the cost to the examiner. What happened to title insurance? Somewhere along the line the burden shifted to the examiner, who does not get a percentage of the premium but only a straight fee. A fee that has continually been pressured to be lowered.

  Yes, you are right to complain, the industry has seen the bottom fall out and is still pretty flat, my only blessing is that I no longer am in it.  The major underwriter is still looking at the bottom line and as long as they get that they don't care. There are so many companies collecting fees to sat mortgages and judgements and are not doing that. Your local abstract agency is doing it but I think the larger out of state companies are not following through. How many of you are abstracting numerous mortgages that you know are SAT? I've seen abstracts with 10 open mortgages on a parcel. We know they are sat but we have no choice but to turn them out. This forces that one owner search to become a 3-4 owner search and we don't get paid for it. More work to do for less money. My wife still continues to try to make a living at it.  Hopefully things will change for her as the pool of so called examiners thins out and business picks up so you can all make a living again.

                                                  Hang in there, Mason