In the Notary Signing Agent business, we have two ways to get this sort of information. One is a website called notarybeware.com. They charge a nominal amount per year to access the site and anyone with access can post ratings and comments about the companies that Notaries work for.

The down-side to this is that companies also get access and some of them will blacklist you from future work (and give negative comments to other companies whom you might like to work for) if you leave negative comments about them on that site. Even so, many Notaries DO post comments there, both pro and con.

Of course, I suspect that many of those with negative comments are just newer Notaries who really do not understand about collections and proper business-to-business etiquette, so I take the data on that site with a grain of salt. Any PUBLIC forum is going to suffer from the same problem -- those willing to share bad faith events from clients are likely to get blasted for it and/or to be newbies in business thus not great references in any case.

A better solution is that offered by The Signing Registry. They require a higher fee to join, along with a minimum number of successful signings before you can even join and their forum/boards are NOT open to companies, so the members are 1) more likely to be experienced professionals and 2) more likely to post both the good and the bad. I trust the feedback on TSR much moreso than that on notarybeware.

Of course, notarybeware has a much larger participation, both because it is cheaper and because it does not require any experience level to join. I am not sure what that means in terms of how representative the experiences posted on those two may be.

Something like the TSR model might work for abstractors -- charge a good chunk of change to join (they charge $50 per year) and require some reasonable level of experience (they were asking for 75 loans last time I checked) and do NOT allow the companies being rated to join. Those seem to be the critical elements in making the results worth having.

One thing that will NOT work (for rating companies) is a blog or open forum where anyone can post. I have seen this time and again on the many forums, boards or chat-spaces where NSAs congregate: a group identification sets in and the next thing you know, whatever one person says will be echoed by a bunch of others and anyone who disagrees will be shouted down. Or you get current employees posting praise or former employees posting criticisms without any particular relevance to the typical experience of the NSA (or abstractor) in dealing with that company.

-- Tim Gatewood
Notary Memphis (http://notarymemphis.com)

to post a reply: login - or - register