Polk County homeowners can now sign up for free email notifications whenever a document is recorded against a property they choose to monitor, County Recorder Julie Haggerty told supervisors at a meeting last month.
Why it matters: Ads selling protection against “home title theft” — situations in which criminals forge documents to transfer property — have become more common in recent years, and the alerts may be a reasonable solution for many people, Haggerty tells Axios.
How it works: The Property Check system lets residents create an account and add properties to “watch.”
- When a document tied to that property’s legal description enters the recorder’s indexing system, the system automatically sends an alert.
Reality check: The tool does not prevent fraud, and by the time you get an alert, it may already be too late.
- If it does occur, the notifications could help remedy the situation more quickly, since most people do not regularly check updates to their land titles, she said.
The big picture: Many paid plans are essentially monitoring and alert systems that can’t stop someone from filing a document, WHO-13 found in a recent consumer story…