Safeco Title Sale Clouds Outlook for 2 Property Records Plants
By law, Los Angeles County keeps track of property records. But when county officials want to check on a piece of land, they often turn to a private title plant. It’s just faster.
Title plants aren’t places where movie moguls concoct names for motion pictures. Instead, they’re computerized warehouses full of property records maintained by title insurers, who need such a shadow Hall of Records for the research they conduct before guaranteeing the legitimacy of a deed.
Los Angeles County is home to three private title plants, including what may be the nation’s busiest, a product of what is locally a $400-million-a-year title-insurance business. Title plants are a long tradition in the West, and tend to sprout in places with lots of land transactions.
But the humdrum world of local title records may be in for some changes soon, thanks to the recent agreement by Chicago Title & Trust to acquire Safeco Title of Panorama City for $85 million.
Safeco’s title plant is part of the deal. But Chicago Title already owns 20% of Title Records Inc. (TRI), a plant in Sun Valley that maintains it is the busiest. So in terms of Los Angeles County property records, Chicago Title will soon have an embarrassment of riches.
Chicago Title is obviously not going to need two plants, said William H. Little, Safeco Title’s chairman. Chicago Title says it doesn’t know what it will do about the two facilities.
The 21 title insurers in Los Angeles County all use a plant, in part because the Hall of Records can’t accommodate them, but mainly because public records must be recorded by name rather than by property number. Thus, a title searcher using public records must look up each person who owned the property, and then each deed, all in separate books or microfilm cassettes.
Title plants offer one-stop shopping: searchers look up a property by lot, block and tract number, and instantly get the previous owners. Searchers can usually do this by computer in a matter of seconds, and without the ambiguities inherent in public records organized by name.
“If you got hold of a Smith, you’d be in for some long hours,” acknowledged Richard Hughes, assistant county registrar-recorder in charge of public property records.
Title plants are surprisingly orderly places. They are far more automated than county courthouses and records repositories. The use of computers, already vital to their function, increases all the time, and there is relatively little paper in evidence. Some experts think optical-storage technology, now used for compact disks, eventually will replace microfilm.
John P. Lewis, senior vice president of Chicago Title Insurance, a unit of Chicago Title & Trust, said his company has made no decision about the TRI plant, which it owns with four other insurers, but that Safeco’s 40-employee Panorama City facility is superior.
The Safeco plant has 60 million records going back to 1947, and eight title firms pay Safeco to use the facilities, Little said. Hughes added that Safeco also has a larger catalogue of old title insurance policies. That’s important because title companies usually don’t search beyond the date of the last policy, when the previous search was done.
The 50,000-square-foot TRI plant in Sun Valley has 47 million records going back to 1963, and is used by its five owners, including Chicago Title, and six fee-paying title-insurance customers.
TRI says it conducts more title searches than any other plant in the nation: an average of 2,500 per day, or more than half the total done in Los Angeles County. And TRI is adding 21,000 square feet soon to make more room for the 350 people who work at its facility.
TRI’s claims of pre-eminence are hard to verify. What’s clear, however, is that it isn’t the oldest title plant.
Founded 130 years ago, the Ticor plant in Rosemead is the granddaddy of Southern California title plants, even if its age is no match for some Eastern plants. The Ticor plant can trace properties “from God forward,” said TRI Executive Vice President Doug Bello in admiration. Other title companies must resort to public records for searches that predate their own files.
Records Precede Statehood
Ticor’s records go back to the Spanish land grants preceding California’s statehood, and its records are so good that both the city and the county of Los Angeles have employees stationed there full time, researching property records.
Production manager James E. Jensen, who runs the Ticor plant, says that he isn’t sure just how many records it has, but that the figure probably exceeds 100 million. Because the Ticor plant serves Ticor alone, it is the site of only 200 to 300 title searches a day. About 300 people work there, Jensen said.
Yet the role of Ticor, which Jensen said has a 12% share of the Los Angeles County title insurance market, is so institutionalized that all the title firms doing business in the county send documents to Ticor rather than to the county recorder’s office.
Ticor microfilms the documents during the night, sends copies to Safeco and TRI, and then delivers the documents to the county somewhere around 2 a.m., Jensen said.
The county also microfilms, but it takes longer, the title companies say. They need the records right away.
The various title companies cooperate in other ways too. Jensen said that Safeco, TRI and Ticor equally divide the cost of data entry to get information into their computers.
“TRI and Ticor and Safeco trade information to offset expenses,” agreed Little.
Both TRI and Ticor are considering offering at least some of their computerized services to users paying a fee for the service. Those plans are months away for both operations, however, and they will face competition from property-records services already available by computer.
