I will not mention the name of the company requesting this information in a public forum.  However, a vendor management company (one of the BIG ones) recently asked us for pricing for several new RUSH products.

Their request for one product said they basically wanted: "Please provide a copy of the current vesting deed with the complete legible legal description.  Abstract all open mortgages, provide Tax ID and effective date".

When I questioned this client about what they meant by all open mortgages, I asked if they meant current owner or  prior owner as my state(s) is(are) primarily grantee/grantor states.  In my opinion, a search request from a client should always contain a starting point and an ending point.  All of our requests state a number of years or number of owners that we want the abstractor to search.  To leave this open ended is far to ambiguous and could lead to a whole lot more liability than the abstractor bargained for. 

So, the clients response was that they wanted all open mortgages, even on prior owners. 

The other issue is that the "current vesting deed" is just that.  It's a deed.  No where did the client say they wanted me to report who the fee simple owner of the property is.  They mistakenly assume that the current deed indicates this, which at least in my states is not true.  A deed is a conveyance instrument, it is not an indicator of fee simply ownership by itself.  It is possible that the fee simple ownership is the sames the Grantee on the last deed of record, but there are plenty of scenarios where this is NOT the case.

So, if you are asked to provide a product or pricing, you may want to dig into the details a little bit before you accept any such assignments.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this?