Title Examiners Play "Hangman" With Clerk Of Courts' Computer System In Search Of Recording Screw-Ups In Sloppy Land Records

In Franklin County, Ohio, The Columbus Dispatch reports:

• Sloppy real-estate records in Franklin County could threaten home buyers with foreclosure and bump up the price of title insurance, title examiners say. They're nervous that they're missing liens hidden in the Franklin County Common Pleas clerk of courts' computer system.

• Errors include misplaced commas, last names entered as first names, first names entered as last names and debtors listed only by their spouse's name. It means that a routine search could fail to turn up a lien that could come back to haunt a home buyer. That happened recently when a Muskingum County family was hit with foreclosure papers because a county clerk had misspelled the former owner's name.

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• "Everyone who has to use the system is basically playing roulette," said Dan Hritz, a title examiner for several large central Ohio companies. [...] In Franklin County, sleuthing out hidden liens has become almost a competition among title examiners, who say they play "hangman" with the computer, typing in every possible permutation of a name to find mistakes.

• "It's a title examiner's nightmare," said Debbie Howard, who works for a Cincinnati law firm that represents banks and mortgage companies. She searches the computer by last name and first name -- the correct way. Then, she runs a search by first name. Then she adds a comma behind the last name, a space behind the last name and sprinkles in "Jr." here and there.

• Dow T. Voelker, a Columbus lawyer who specializes in real-estate law, noticed the problem about a year ago. "You have to just sort of live in fear that, at some point, somebody is going to make a claim because you missed a lien because you couldn't find it."

For the story, see Errors in lien data could cost buyers (Misspellings, mistakes leave county guessing on property searches).

For a story on how a homebuyer got screwed because of an error in the local county land records, see The Columbus Dispatch: Clerk's error jeopardizes family's home (Undetected lien against seller haunts buyer).

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