My name is Ryan, I'm the vendor manager at Abstractopia, and I just wanted to let all you searchers out there know that if you are tired of having your prices haggled down to nearly nothing, apparently Crawford County Kansas is the place to go!
We had an order out there, and I will keep the company who did it for us anonymous - just a regular current owner, nothing crazy. I called around a few places (this county seemed pretty remote judging by the amount of searchers listed on SOT), and finally found a contact who would do the search. The receptionist quoted me 200 dollars plus copies. Ouch, but sometimes (especially out there in KS) there isn't much you can do about it. So we sent the order over and didn't think much of it until the next day.
I opened up an email and it looked like just a monthly invoice (it being the end of the month, we've seen quite a few of these). It was one order for 325 dollars, so I assumed it was for some of the commercial work we do. However I recognized the order number as the Crawford County order (everyone who has had a real headache of an order knows how some numbers stick in your head). The charge of 200 dollars was their base fee. Then there was a 75 dollar "24 month chain fee". 24 month chain is a pretty standard requirement from all of our clients, and (working in 20 states) I have never seen an additional fee for this. To add insult to financial injury, they only pulled one deed for us, and it was in 1999. So if we had sent this order over without the "24 month chain of title" requirement, we would have gotten the same order, at 75 dollars cheaper (which this abstractor happily admitted). The next item on the invoice was a 50 dollar "copy charge". "Goodness!" I thought, thinking that I must have mistakenly ordered full copies, or that there were 50 judgments against this guy. Not the case. There were full copy mortgages (the order sheet states we only need pertinent pages), and a deed. They totaled about 24 pages. Wow, about two dollars a page for copies? Not too shabby. We actually used 12 - $4 per page.
So I called the abstractor to see what was going on with this extra 125 dollars in fees. The receptionist informed me that she "had no way of knowing what pertinent pages we would need so they pulled all the pages". Now our order sheets clearly state what pages we need. Then the owner came on the phone and after a bit of civil conversation, dropped most of the erroneous fees (although he never dropped the attitude). He cited that they charge $50 in copies "because, you know, some of these searches have 5 deeds and full mortgage copies" which was similar to his argument regarding the 24 month chain charge as "well, there can be a lot of deeds to go past two years." Our simple search met neither requirement.
Now my problem isn't that he wanted to charge this much for his services, my problem is that he tried to slip them in there on the sly. This is the exact same tactic people hate when they get their car fixed, or on their cell phone plans. We hear a lot on this site about Title Companies and Vendor Managers out there trying to get everything for less than what it's worth, but this is on the opposite end of the spectrum. An abstractor taking advantage of the situation because they know they have a monopoly or they just think adding $125 to their quote is okay and we won't notice? How do you expect to ever get another order from the same company again with these tactics?
PS: If there are any good KS searchers out there, please feel free to email me your coverage at ryan@abstractopia.com. We look for good communication, accurate ETA’s, and a sense of humor never hurts! Integrity and ethics are a must. to post a reply:
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