Allegheny County is in the final stages of changing the ways journalists, homebuyers, attorneys, and historians use land records stored in the County Office Building at Forbes Avenue and Ross Street downtown. Once accessible in large heavy and dusty books, more than 230 years of deeds, deeds, mortgages and other property records will soon be available only on computer terminals inside the Recorder of Deeds Real Estate Division office and online, for a fee, through a third-party vendor.
The changes are part of a decades-long project to digitize the records that the county is required by state law to permanently retain. The records document every land sale, subdivision, and financial transaction involving property in Allegheny County all the way back to the county’s founding in 1788.
“We’ve been scanning our books since the early 2000s,” says Real Estate Division manager Jeff Liebert.
The move towards modernizing the Recorder of Deeds began in 1997. “We quit actually creating a book in paper form,” Liebert explains. “So we’ve been scanning documents. Anything now that’s recorded gets scanned.”…