In the real estate industry and law, a title search or property title search is the process of retrieving documents evidencing events in the chronicle of a piece of real property, to determine relevant interests in and regulations concerning that property. Historically, this has been a very manual, paper-based process. Title Insurance companies that invest in software automation solutions can achieve significant performance improvement.
In the case of a forthcoming purchase, a title search is performed primarily to answer questions regarding a property:
- Does the seller have a sellable interest in such property?
- What kind of restrictions or allowances pertain to the use of the land including real covenants, easements, and other servitudes.
- Do any liens exist on the property which needs to be paid off at closing? Such as mortgages, back taxes, mechanic’s liens, and other assessments.
A title search is also performed when an owner wishes to mortgage his property and the bank requires the owner to insure this transaction, this is known as Title Insurance.
Documents concerning conveyances of land are a matter of public record. Therefore, anyone can perform a title search. The real challenge is that these documents are maintained in hard copy paper format or sometimes scanned into image files. The information within the documents is typically not available in a structured data format as the records are descriptions of legal events which contain terms, conditions, and language in excess of actual key data. Documents that fall into this category could include Deeds, Releases, Judgments, Plat Maps, Liens, and Power of Attorney. In many cases, like the Legal Description, these descriptions can be paragraphs long and in some cases span pages of a document.
Property records are stored in the government and county records offices as individual documents, such as deeds, mortgages, and liens. Each document represents an event or transaction that occurred in history on the property. For a particular property, there may be dozens of papers spread out over time that change a property’s status. Therefore, documents are not all in one place, as they are stored in different books, or records, based on the day and month that the event happened and a countless number of locations.
For owners and managers of a Title Plant, the organizations that keep track of these public records, the challenge is transferring accurate, up to date, data from these documents is due to irregularities in the documents and the language used to describe properties is not formatted for easy extraction and analysis.
These documents include:
- Property and Ownership Information
- Deed/Vesting Information
- Tax Information
- Open Mortgage/Deed of Trust Information
- Related Judgments, UCC, Liens Against Owner
Traditionally Title Plant companies have had to rely on manual keying of data from these documents into database systems accessible for search. These plants or databases are requiring constant updates due to the changes in property ownership and recording of the above public records. For the plants, this means they are regularly spending time, money, and labor updating their databases and records. The data entry operators are not just keying from a document but also subject matter experts, so can read and interpret the data embedded and buried in these documents.
Axis Technical Group offers a far better choice with a revolutionary software automation solution for extracting information from unstructured content. Using proprietary algorithms, including those used to perform Natural Language Processing (NLP), Axis Smart Data Extraction™ reads and extracts data from sentences, paragraphs, or entire pages written in natural English.
Organizations now have a superior alternative to manually re-keying data or relying upon the costly and ineffective results of other unstructured data extraction solutions.