REBA Annual Meeting Seminar

The Real Estate Bar Association for Massachusetts (REBA), formerly known as the Massachusetts Conveyancers Association, held its annual meeting seminar at the Wyndham Hotel in Westborough. Thanks to REBA for inviting Registers of Deeds to attend. I squeezed into the standing room only crowd for the foreclosure program (Members of the bar must be noticing the rapid growth in the numbers of Notices of Sale appearing in the local newspapers). While the formal instructional portion of the day was very interesting, the most useful time I spent was in the hallway, chatting with dozens of attorneys who concentrate their practices in real estate. One message I received loud and clear is their strong support for Indexing Standards. While they may differ with some of the details, they long for predictability in registry databases. Two problem areas that were mentioned repeatedly have little to do with the actual Indexing Standards themselves. A lack of compliance with the standards seems to be a widespread phenomenon at registries. While the folks in the front office may have voted for the standards, the clerks at the counter may not be following them, especially where the standards dictate a method of indexing that differs from the long-standing practice at that particular registry. The other issue that arose was the need to convert existing registry databases to comply with the new standards. This will be a complex, labor and resource intensive operation, but it really must be done, otherwise title examiners will have to conduct multiple searches on the same name just to catch all the possible variants of that name created under the evolving methods of index creation through the years.