The Vision of an Examination-ready Title Plant
Automatically Harvesting All Documents in a Title Search
There is a self-help Website aimed at consumers that covers such diverse topics as "how to sift flour" and "how to reduce your carbon footprint." It also explains, in 400 words and four photos, how to conduct a title search, saying that "… the task can be completed with relative ease."
If only it were so.
In reality, title searching is a highly specialized activity, even when an automated title plant is involved. To complete a search you must understand not only how to look, but where to look for records and documents. This is especially true when it comes to linking properties to document images, such as maps, and associating parcels that may have a historical relationship. Title companies have been known to maintain their own local cross-reference tools, policies, and other media to streamline future searches.
Property Insight plant operations specialists have been working to simplify the search process by expanding and strengthening the integrity of property location keys, which together define the Property Control File, the backbone of a modern plant. This enables association of current and historical documents and records in the plant and ties parcels to historical maps and documents with absolute certainty, enabling search applications to automatically "harvest" relevant images in a title search.
"With the proper property identifiers, our clients can begin a comprehensive title plant search minimally using an APN or property address, and we will reliably return the rest," explained Nikki Bell, Property Insight President. "We are creating an examination-ready environment by being able to harvest diverse data and image sets across the title plant with certainty, setting the stage for vesting, legal description, exceptions and supporting documents for a given property," she added.
"One key principle is the creation and maintenance of property account definitions granular enough to conform to the unique public record legal boundary," said Nikki. "Add to that an association to its respective Tax Parcel number, and expand to include associations to all applicable and diverse map image sets, and even back plant images, and you can then get a sense of how we’re endeavoring to streamline the title search process."
The integration of these data and image sets coincides with increasingly rigorous plant posting practices, such as tightly maintained property create and vacate dates, validated primary and secondary document relationships, and the strategic capture of key data directly abstracted off public records.
“Modern plant technology plays a vital role in facilitating these improvements,” says Nikki. “Property Insight has completed converting 100% of its title plants to the modern plant environment. This has created capabilities historically unachievable in the legacy plant systems," she said. "All of the limitations resulting from constrained field space and truncated records are eliminated, creating the ability to store richer and more highly integrated data sets."
At the same time the required skill sets for plant operation specialists continue to evolve, as plant experts become more skilled in leveraging technology to maintain and perform quality control on plants.
"At one time plant operations was behind the technology curve," explained Nikki. "Now we're ahead of it. We're seeing significant savings in plant operations expense and delivering global improvements on plant data while creating a better examination environment for our clients," she said.
"Today's enhancements will enable tomorrow's routine processes," she said. “Once we demonstrate the reliability of these enhancements, users' confidence in the plants will only increase, and they will begin to reap the benefits of a more fruitful and productive search automation process."
"When our community thinks about workflow efficiency, it tends to focus on search technology," said Nikki. "But fundamentally improving how we capture, store, and associate the underlying data upon which that search technology rests," she added, “is what you might call the secret sauce.”
And maybe someday the task of completing a title search can be performed with relative ease.