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Tuesday, December 14, 2010

This Month in Real Estate (US) : December 2010

Blogging From The Desk of Alicia Lagarde-Craig

This Month in Real Estate: December 2010

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Update Regarding The Mortgage and Conveyance Division's Online Data Recovery

Blogging From The Desk of Alicia Lagarde-Craig

Update from Dale Atkins, The Clerk of Civil District Court
The following updates took place as of December 7, 2010:


PERSONNEL:
In total, 90 men and women are working on the data recovery project as of today, and the Clerk of Court's office is continuing to add personnel to complete this task as soon as possible.

BACKLOG COMPLETED:
The backlog of documents in the Conveyance and Mortgage divisions has been eliminated. This means all mortgage and conveyance documents received between October 26 and November 18, when the system was reactivated for data entry and cashiering, have been entered in the system.

CERTIFICATES:
As it relates to Sheriff’s sales, they are current on all Sheriff Certificates through sale date of December 29, 2010. The Clerk of Court's Office forgot to mention that the houses that are going through a Sheriff's Sale at this time were marketed 45 days in advance, meaning these houses were advertised in October, before the online data crash.

RESTORATION OF DATA PROJECT: CONVEYANCE
The Clerk's office is confident the final delivery of the 60,000 conveyance instruments which are currently being re-entered by the Windward Group will be Sunday, Jan. 2, 2011. Once the data is delivered, the only task will be to verify the information. The first delivery of a 1000-piece sample was successfully delivered by the Windward Group on Dec. 1, 2010 and successfully uploaded into the Clerk's database. This data is now being verified. Another 10,000 records are expected for delivery on Friday, Dec. 10, 2010. As more records are entered, more personnel will be shifted to data verification to speed this project along. The date of January 2, 2011 that the Clerk's office mentions is not a guarantee.

RESTORATION OF DATA: MORTGAGE DIVISION
The Clerk of Court's office is in the final stages of negotiating a contract for the data input of the more than 119,000 mortgage documents which need to be restored in the online system. Until the contract is signed, the work is being done internally. Nevertheless, the Clerk's office feels confident this data will be completely uploaded by mid-January 2011, but they are pushing for a commitment to an earlier delivery date of the data. Again, once data is delivered successfully into the system, the Clerk's office begins a verification process of the entries. The time frame for the verification process is about 7-14 days, but there are no guarantees on this either.

In short, this means that there will be very few closing until Mid-January 2011.

If your closing has been delayed as a result of the online data crash in Orleans Parish, here is a checklist of things that you can provide to the Title Company that may help to speed up the closing:

-Obtain Financial Statements from the Seller(s)
-Obtain Forwarding Address of the Seller(s)
-In Whose Name Is The Property Assessed?
-What is the Assessed Value?
-Any Outstanding Mortgages (1st Mortgage, 2nd Mortgage, HELOC)?
-Copy Of Appraisal
-Length Of Time The Seller Owned The Home? _____ Years
-Financial Statement Or Loan Application From The Borrower

If you have any questions regarding real estate, please contact me at 504.382.3724 or email me at AliciaLagarde@kw.com