Court clerk says she still wants to do a complete review of all of the records in her databases back to 1987
A little more than three months after a disastrous computer crash brought the real estate market to a grinding halt, the Orleans Parish Civil District Court clerk said Thursday all mortgage and conveyance records are restored and verified.
The electronic database of real estate records was completely restored in January, but Clerk Dale Atkins said the re-entered data had to be verified to certify that it accurately reflected the documents submitted for each property.
A meltdown in October caused 119,000 mortgage documents and 35,000 conveyance records to be deleted from computer servers, creating a gap of as much as a year and a half in the records. A remote backup provided by a contractor also failed.
While the records existed in paper form in the clerk's offices, the electronic indexing system that allowed citizens to search the records also was erased.
The crash fouled up countless real estate transactions, because without a searchable record of all liens, judgments and other property-related documents, title insurers were reluctant to certify that sellers or those seeking refinancing had free and clear ownership of the property in question.
Brent Laliberte, the head of the area's title attorney association and co-founder of Bayou Title, said he's confident the records are as accurate as they were before the crash. He said the data always contained some inconsistencies -- things like records entered under "St. Charles" in one case, "St Charles" in another and "Saint Charles" in yet another -- but nothing that resourceful title abstractors couldn't deal with by doing exhaustive searches.
Laliberte said the crash and three-month recovery created major headaches, but did not prove to be the catastrophe for the local real estate industry that some predicted.
"For anyone directly affected you don't want to minimize it," he said, noting that some home sales and refinancing deals fell through because of the delay. "But I think the severity was somewhat minimized by the fact that the title attorneys, the clerk's office and the insurance underwriters were able to work together. All of us were able to close more files sooner than we thought we would."
Atkins has said that she wants to do a complete review of all of the records in her databases back to 1987 to make sure the abstracts and indexes are complete and accurate. That will be a critical step in her plan to scan images of all paper records into a new searchable computer system.
She has estimated the whole process of replacing the data and verifying it, using contractor Windward Group and an expanded staff of more than 108 people, would cost more than $300,000.
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David Hammer can be reached at dhammer@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3322.