Don't let more than 2 counties bother you Michael.  I do a total of 8 counties.  Of those 4 are considered metro counties, 2 outer counties and 2 rural counties.  My closest county is 10 minutes North; from there I have 2 to the east - one outer, one rural; one to the direct north of the first northern county, 2 rural to the northeast; 2 to the west and Dallas to the south of me.  My office almost in the direct middle of all counties and a mid-day stopping point unless a complete triangle is done.  Title work takes priority before doc retrievals unless I have one title and a load of doc retrievals I will do that first.  Not to use someone for all metro counties: Collin, Denton, Dallas, Tarrant is not even smart as the cities contained in these counties overlap each other much more than the outer or rural counties.  The outer and rural counites have a much smaller population and usually 48 hours is given for those.  I have not had any problem servicing any of these counties and if I did not service all metro counties I would have to ask all kinds of work to be reassigned because it was ordered for the wrong county.  Companies just using you for 2 counties cause problems when they think they are in those 2 counties and you need to go to a 3rd actually to get the order done and you are stuck with 1 order - which you are likely to hold until orders come in from another company that uses you in the 3rd.  It is much better to assign several orders to each vendor in all the metro counties that they service so if one is assigned to the wrong county they still have other orders that will not make them hesitate to process that one incorrectly assigned.  I have serviced 5 counties in a day before.  Everyone gets my work on time.  You have to understand that depending on the state and counties; the amount of work pulled from abstractors have just left searches with probates, divorces, or deeds outside the computer range of copies - because they think the online is giving them a good search.  Now that it has been what 2 years in some counties and claims popping up - I found 2 judgments not picked up and paid off at closing for 2 local attorneys - tons of other judgments and liens, missed releases, child support liens not picked up by abstractors or companies that I did updates for -give it a few more years - it takes years sometimes for mistakes to pop up and when they do are these companies going to be able to insure themselves.  I don't think any of us are over-extending ourselves except for having less orders to pay for the gasoline, parking, etc per county.  Like Kevin and everyone said, we had to open up counties to keep afloat.  There is less work per county.  There are many different ways people are dealing with the current situation - some are lowering fees then can't ever get them back up again, some are opening more counties and picking up a much larger customer base.  You see if you consider this a problem, then the title companies, vendor management companies and doc retrieval companies can only blame themselves for this development.  It is not what we choose to do in the beginning but rather a result of what did someone say in the NALTEA article something like "the moving cheese."