We’re the Franklin County Recorder’s Office. We’re the largest recorder’s office in the state of Ohio, and I look at us as the filing cabinet of the county. Every property in the county goes through our office. We record deeds. We record mortgages, liens, plat surveys—a whole host of documents that are vital to the process of buying a home, of engaging in a commercial real estate transaction—and we’re very proud of that. You know, it’s important work and it’s really a pleasure to serve such a dynamic community. Columbus and Franklin County is one of the fastest-growing real estate counties in the country. So, we have a big job to do every single day. And it’s a big burden, but we do it really well.
Electronic recording of documents is a really, really big thing for us. Prior to COVID, we were about twenty-five to thirty percent eRecordings. Once we were able to work with the county auditor’s office and get eRecordings up and available, we hit seventy-five, seventy-eight percent eRecordings at certain points. Last year was just under seventy percent. I would say that’s the biggest thing. Now, if you talk to our customers and clients, they would say the recorder’s office has really adapted since COVID.
The sheer volume of documents that we get as the most populous county in the state of Ohio, could be overwhelming for some people. We record about a hundred and ninety thousand documents averaged out per year, and that’s a big burden to place on our staff. And at times, we’ll have entities and real estate deals where there’s hundreds of documents brought in in one day, and we have to deal with that. We have such an important commitment to the taxpayers of Franklin County to do a good job, to make sure that those documents are processed with integrity, but also with speed. Our job is to not get in the way of real estate deals. Our job is to facilitate these very important transactions. These transactions could be anything from a large multifamily housing development that’s gonna provide affordable housing for families to a family buying their first home that they’ve been saving up for for ten years. And we take that very, very seriously.
Being on the Neumo product has been great. It’s really improved the efficiency and speed with which we can process documents. A document may come in over the counter or eRecording or mail, and within fifteen, twenty minutes, that document is into indexing, scanning, verifying, and it’s publicly viewable to the public.
Whether it’s a lawyer, whether it’s a title searcher, whether it’s someone who’s interested in looking up the history of their home. We are proud to partner with Neumo in terms of making sure that that is something that everyone who wants to access a record in Franklin County can do. And it’s on us to make sure that those documents are available in a speedy fashion. We’re proud to have a turnaround time that is less than one day from when a document is recorded to when it’s publicly available, but continuing to harness all that is available from a technological standpoint is something that we take very, very seriously because we want everyone who partners with our county, who’s a stakeholder in our county, to have access to the records that they need to get their job done.
