Mark,

In my area we have no county government. Each land
records office is located in one of 144 town halls.
To date only one town hall in the entire state has
gone over to a completely automated system. You can
actually do the search from your office. Both
the index and the actual recorded documents can be
viewed directly from your office. The Town charges a
subscription fee to use the system. However, I have
not seen any decline in the number of searche orders
that I receive for this location. The system has only
been operational for about one year, but I have not
noticed any rush to use it by clients. It is probably
going to take some time for this system to catch on
here because it is very expensive,and each town is
responsible for the expense of implementing
the system from it tax base. Not all of the towns can
afford it. Some of them are still using the old hand
written indices that were used 30 or 40 years ago.
The computer age has arrived, and I agree with some of
the comments below that we all need to adapt to the
information age. In Darwinian terms, only the strong
survive.

In this area we lose a lot of time on
the road traveling from one land records office to
the next. Perhaps if we could cut unproductive travel
time by using an automated system to search records
directly from our offices we could fill the
unproductive time with greater volume of work at a
more competitive price.

I posted a question below requesting information on
how the implementation of a computerized system
impacted on the title search business in Wisconsin.
If we could find out, the Wisconsin example may be
a precursor as to what will happen in the remaining states
and give the searchers some time to adapt

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