Comprehensive Real Estate and eRecording Services

Disclaimer: Please be advised that this recorded webinar has been edited from its original format, which may have included a product demo. To set up a live demo or to request more information, please complete the form to the right. Or if you are currently not on CSC Global, there is a link to the website in the description of this video. Thank you.

Tarik: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar, "Comprehensive Real Estate and eRecording Services for Submitters." My name is Tarik Hopkins, and I will be your moderator.

Joining us today are Andrew Singleton and Peter Rassias. Peter is the Director of CSC's Real Estate Division based out of Wilmington, Delaware headquarters. His primary focus is business development and strategic growth of electronic document recording, which is known as eRecording. He joined CSC in 2007 and transitioned to the Real Estate Division in 2020. He brings a vast experience in sales leadership to his team, and under his guidance the business has experienced record-setting growth. Andy is a national account manager and corporate consultant for CSC based out of the Wilmington, Delaware headquarters. He joined the team in 2015, and his role includes onboarding submitters to CSC's eRecording digital tools and new client acquisition.

And with that, let's welcome Peter and Andy.

Pete: Thanks so much Tarik and everyone. Welcome and thank you for taking the time to join our webinar today. As Tarik mentioned, my name is Pete Rassias. I'm one of the sales directors here with CSC. I've been with CSC for almost 15 years and was with Bank of America's Mortgage Lending Division for 5 years prior.

A little bit about CSC. We're the trusted provider of choice for 90% of the Fortune 500 companies. We are a 100-year-old company, still growing every single year. We've got the security of a big company, and sometimes we're just as agile as a startup. We are headquartered out of Wilmington, Delaware, and also have offices worldwide. We work with over 10,000 law firms and are ranked by the "New York Law Journal" as a top provider for legal services. We support over 180,000 companies, all the way up to the Fortune 5, all the way down to businesses that we are setting up every single day. Our services are scalable no matter how big or small you want to be. Our digital brand teams probably support 7 of the Top 10 Global Brands, and we work with over 3,000 financial institutions that are keeping us extremely busy, especially over the last 18 months. So as our slogan goes, we're the business behind business.

The second item I'd like to show you today is our robust menu of service offerings. Some of you on the call today are already using us for one or two of these services and are taking advantage of CSC to handle many of your compliance filings. What you're seeing is a comprehensive list of services that CSC offers with real estate recording and searching just be one portion. So if you're looking to incorporate, if you're looking to filing reports, if you're looking to file business licenses, if you're looking for a document repository for service of process or some of our matter management solutions, we've got you covered.

In terms of a quick overview of today's presentation, we are going to be discussing how CSC services beyond eRecording fits within your business and helps you keep up with the rapid pace that the market is demanding.

So here is the snapshot of our 2021 real estate landscape. We recognize what's going on in the market and how it's shifting and how we're able to respond and react. I mean, simply put, we're in the middle of a boom. Mortgage lending had a boom. eRecording had a boom. Just about everything in real estate has had this boom. It's been driven by historic rates that are under 3%, and the real estate industry as a whole is undergoing this seismic shift. Home sales are expected to reach 2.5 trillion in 2021, which is drawing out these new processes and people. And meanwhile, we have this widespread availability of cloud-based, integrated technology that's opening up new ways of doing business to kind of keep up with this rapid pace.

The images on the slide indicate a double-down effect in the market. The increase in real estate transactions is kind of right on the heels of COVID, and it's created this demand and need for this warp-speed experience. So this big scramble happened on the onset of COVID, and the industry adjusted. We modified our processes and implemented this new technology all to frankly just to stay in business. And pivoting to stay alive has kind of turned into this true silver lining in our industry.

Because many organizations prepared their companies with new technology, they've been able to manage this increase in volume, and it's the increase in volume that also created the demand for technology and efficiency, but they've been able to stay in business. And those that were agile enough to change were far better equipped to ride this long wave into the end of the year. Those that were stuck in their traditional, manual processes are capped and they had to turn business away, and so they didn't grow as quickly as other companies.

So what we're seeing is, you know, not only is real estate going up, but the electronic version of real estate is escalating much faster than real estate is right now. So, in other words, it's all going electronic, and it's going to likely stay that way.

Here's our agenda for today. I'm going to kick it over to Andy, and he's going to talk about our property search services. All the title companies on the line, put on your earmuffs. No, just kidding. But no, our law firms and our banks do love this search service that we rolled out last year. Andy is also going to talk about document templates for commercial and residential customers. He's going to kick it back over to me and I'm going to talk about the Signer Manager tool, eTrustee services, deed of trust look-up in Colorado. And then Andy is going to bring us home with our custom email notifications and our borrower notification services.

Andy: All right. Again, thank you, Pete and Tarik. So my name is Andy. I'm with the eRecording team. I'm a national account manager here on the team. And I'm going to discuss a number of things, starting off with our property search services that we developed over the past year. And some of the information and data that can be obtained through our search services you can see on the screen here — parcel identification number, you can verify ownership, legal description of properties, property tax statuses, as well as images of already recorded data.

Okay. So on your screen now you should see our property search feature within ePrepare. To the left, you can see how we search, how our users search for properties. They can use either the property address, the APN, or the owner. And when using the address, for example, you'll just enter in all the details of that particular address and you'll hit Search. And once you do that, you'll be provided with three types of reports, one being a detailed report, the other being a summary report, and then the third being a property tax report.

The detailed report, just as it says, it's extremely detailed. It will provide you with whatever data is provided by that particular county, and it will give you all the details of the property from who the current owner is to as far back as the county records have provided us to pull from. In some cases, it will go back from the time that it was transmitted from the builder to the first homeowner. And this data can be very detailed. And in most cases, you can pull images from each one of those transactions pertaining to that search, from the deed of trust or the mortgage or the deed itself. And in some ways, my experience has been that a lot of banks use this search service to pull the original deed of trust or mortgage to reference the recording data off of that document to be able to satisfy or release that particular loan.

Okay. So the next slide that we're going to talk about is our Level 3 or L3 templates. We have templates for every county throughout the nation. Over 3,600 templates are in our library. And what our templates are, are mainly for . . . they're solely for rather our banking partners. There are assignments to various types of assignments of leases and rents to the backend with reconveyances, releases, and satisfactions or partial releases. And they're both for the commercial and the residential side. And the nice thing with our system is that you can go in and render a document using our L3 templates, and at that point you could do what you want with it. You can either print it out, wet sign it and wet notarize, and send it off to the county at your leisure, or you can eRecord that fully executed document using our system. And by doing so, this makes our system 100% digital throughout the entire process.

Pete: All right. I'm back to talk about our Signer Manager tool. This is a big efficiency enhancement for meeting deadlines and prioritizing. Simply put, not all packages are created equal, and some have a much higher priority than others. And here is our Signer Manager tool to help resolve that.

So customers using our L3 eRecording service, are able to digitally sign and notarize their assignments and releases in ePrepare. With the Signer Manager tool, it allows you to appoint the required signers and notaries of the document at the time it is signed instead of just when the document is created. In addition, ePrepare can prioritize those documents and kind of queue them up in order of signing based on compliance time frames to ensure that documents that need to be recorded quickly are processed first. You can assign more urgent documents first. So the tool adds an additional level of efficiency to our L3 eRecording process and gives you the flexibility for determining your signers and notaries.

Andy: Yeah, this is a great tool, Pete, for a lot of our banking customers. We've had customers in the past where one of their locations closed down due to inclement weather, and one of their other locations was able to pick up on all of their documents that they had pending at the other location. So this tool really helps with that, maintaining that flow of activity and ensuring that there's no disruption into their workflow.

Pete: Moving right along, we've also added an eTrustee service to ePrepare. This integrated solution streamlines the lender's process of signing, substituting, and recording a reconveyance of deed of trust. The service allows you to appoint a new trustee so that they can release the deed of trust. For documents that can be submitted electronically, the process is fully digital, and your reconveyance documents are often recorded within 24 hours. It eliminates the need for you to keep track of paper documents or work with an additional party to record these reconveyances. The eTrustee service is available with eRecording and with our paper fulfillment service.

So this service is really simple to use. When preparing the document in ePrepare, there's a simple yes or no question asking whether or not you need to send the document to CSC for trustee signing. When you select Yes, we'll populate the required information and take care of everything. While deeds of trust can be filed in many states throughout the U.S., only certain states require the trustee to release the deed of trust. Those states are generally located on the western half of the country, so Alaska, California, Montana, Nebraska, Oregon, and Washington. All the states are listed on the slide here.

All right. Next we have our deed of trust look-up. This is kind of a great example where some of these regulations sometimes tend to overcomplicate a very simple recording and why you need someone like us that can help you in all 50 states. We have our deed of trust look-up service in Colorado. And when recording a release of deed of trust in Colorado, it first must be approved and signed by a public trustee who's an elected county official. As part of their approval process, the public trustee requires a copy of the recorded deed of trust. So we can help you here. We've developed a direct integration with the public trustee offices in Colorado to retrieve a copy of the recorded deed of trust and have it submitted along with your prepared release directly to the public trustee. All you need to do is just check a box when preparing your document to use this service, and they will receive the documents they need to sign and send it off to the recorder.

Andy: All right. So we're going to be wrapping up things here in the next couple of slides with I'm going to go ahead and start here with our custom email notifications. And what this is it's just as it sounds. We can customize an email for you to be able to send to your clients whenever documents have been recorded on their behalf, whenever you've recorded documents for your client base.

We provide you with a template, and it's rather simple to use. You just apply your logo and your company information onto our template. Once a document has been recorded through your ePrepare account, then you check off that you want to custom email notification sent to that respective email address. Then once the document is recorded, they'll receive that email as well as a PDF or TIFF image of that recorded instrument as part of that email notification. It's a really nice feature. On the backend, it's one less step that you have to worry about. Once you get your recorded documents back to you, you no longer have to make a copy of it and mail it out or try to figure out a way to get it to your client base. All you have to do is incorporate our custom email notification within your existing ePrepare account and let us do the work for you.

Pete: Yeah, this is a great example where, you know, COVID kind of forced everybody to go to this paperless environment and where some of these notifications, you know, lenders and customers were used to receiving these things via paper mail. Now you can just automatically email these notifications out as soon as that package is returned. So it's just something that's integrated and makes life a little bit easier for everybody.

Andy: Yeah, and I'll give you an example. Last summer, I worked with a company in Florida who are very specific in their client base. They were representing private homeowners who needed to have documents recorded for any type of work that was done on their property. There's a document called a notice of commencement that has to be processed in the state of Florida, and this company that I worked with represents those homeowners that need that document recorded. And as you can imagine, it's not as if my client is working with the same group of clients day in and day out. They may work with someone and never work with them again.

So I introduced this custom email notification to them. They loved it, and they've been using it ever since. I check in with her every month or so, and it's really helped to streamline a lot of processes on their end. It makes things a lot more efficient. They can better manage their time with this one less thing that they have to worry about on the backend.

And here you'll see a sample of the custom email notification. Rather generic and basic in appearance, but it provides all the information that you need to provide to your client base relative to the documents that were recorded on their behalf and the images of documents that are going to be accompanying this notification to your client base.

Okay. So the next thing that I want to talk about is our borrower notification letter service or process. This is specific for our banking partners, those that record releases or satisfactions ore reconveyances, depending on what part of the country you're in. And what this does, rather simple as it sounds. Once your borrowers have satisfied their loan and you record that release or satisfaction on their behalf, you can have a borrower notification letter created within our system, and much like the custom email notification, that notice will be sent to your borrower along with an image of the recorded release or satisfaction as part of that notification.

That is done by mail however. So once the document has been recorded, our team will physically mail the BNL along with the recorded instrument to your borrower on the address that you would indicate through our ePrepare system. And then at that point, everything has been taken care of, and your borrower has been notified. Your address is listed as the return address. So if for some reason it doesn't make it back to your borrower, then it will be returned to you to take care of.

Okay. So on your screen now is where you'll see, within ePrepare, there will be additional data fields that will be shown once you hit Yes for a borrower notification letter to be processed for this particular package. All you need to input is your borrower name and their physical address for that letter to be sent to. And to your right is a sample of what the borrower notification letter would look like. Now, unlike the custom email notification, in this option, you're going to provide us with a template of what you want your BNL to look like. We then upload that into your ePrepare account. Once the BNL has been initiated through ePrepare and the document has been recorded, then we have a team dedicated to take care of handling the process of preparing that BNL, making a copy of the recorded instrument, and then sending it off to your clients for their copy.