Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Road Home contractor researched wrong titles
By David Hammer
Staff writer
At the beginning of this year, Road Home administrators sought to jump-start tedious title searches and other end-of-the-process checks that had gummed up the distribution of aid to homeowners.
The idea: to get its contracted title company, First American, to start working on checking applicants’ land records before the program’s administrators could separately complete some 40 steps of inspections, appraisals, calculations and verifications. That way, the often lengthy title searches would be accomplished simultaneously.
Trouble is, Road Home contractor ICF international and the title company have been working almost exclusively on separate cases — so 10,000 files ready for closing, the vast majority, don’t match the 26,000 title searches now completed.A spokeswoman described the apparent disconnect as an unlikely coincidence.
“For whatever reason, they just have not matched up,” said ICF spokeswoman Gentry Brann. “But when we start getting matches, we’ll really start clearing the backlog.”
The total backlog of ready-to-go files need title work was about 11,500 at the end of last week. Nearly 90 percent of those files don’t match the completed title searches.“Those 26,000 or so are ready once we get the people’s option letters back,” Brann said.
In all, the program has closed only about 3,000 of more than 115,000 applications as of March 12, though officials have promised closings will rapidly accelerate soon.
At the end of 2006, when the program first started to get a sizable number of files through its complex review process, it generated thousands of award commitment letters. First American said it had the capacity to perform 500 closings a day, but it ran into delays when it would try to do title searches on otherwise completed files.
Title searchers ran into incomplete land records and limited hours of operations at damaged parish government offices, creating a new logjam.
David Hammer can be reached at dhammer@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3322.
