A surge in electronic recordings

Yesterday we established a new record for the number of electronic recordings processed. The previous high was 107 on April 13, 2009. Yesterday, we recorded 168 documents electronically. That group, which constituted 42% of our overall recordings for the day, included 120 discharges, 31 assignments, 1 deed, 9 mortgages, 1 certificate, 1 homestead and 5 orders of notice. We actually reviewed many more than the 168 that made it on record (for instance, at 8:30 a.m., there were 177 in the electronic pipeline), but we rejected quite a few with the most common reason being that the land involved was not in this registry district.

Unlike other registries, we do not use an electronic queuing system to control the order of recording of electronically submitted and carried-in documents. The reason we don’t have it was illustrated with our experience yesterday. With the current queuing systems, incoming electronic recordings are assigned a sequential number as are walk-in recordings and there is no way to bump someone at the back of the queue higher up in line. If we did have such a system in operation and a poor customer came in at 8:35 a.m. with a single document, he would have had to wait for nearly two hours until registry employees completed the review and recording of all the documents that arrived electronically. Without such a system, we had the flexibility to wait on that customer while other registry employees continued processing the electronically submitted documents, so everything got recorded within a reasonable amount of time.