About a month after closing on a house, I received a very formal-looking letter from the "Local Records Office" saying "please respond by [X] date, " after which an "additional Fee of $10.00 will be required before processing, " on top of the $89 fee. Naturally I initially assumed it was yet another minor expense associated with buying a house, but upon closer inspection, I wondered why the mailing address was in California when my new house was not.
Reading the fine print, although it never explicitly says so, this is a for-profit company offering something that your title company probably already did - get you a copy of the deed. Between the bar codes, the information that looks private (like the purchase price of your home and the address), and language used, it looks like an official document if you don't look at the fine print.
This is a useless, predatory service that obviously targets the unwary. Send hate mail to P.O. Box 1348, Norwalk, CA 90651.
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