Research at the Registry Of Deeds

Buying a house without professional help is a big gamble, but on the other hand, I can hardly shell out for professional help just on the odds I might bid at a public auction. The place to research houses that are up for auction is the local register of deeds. Since the two houses I've looked at are in different counties of Massachusetts, I've now been to both the Hampshire Registry of Deeds and the Hampden Registry of Deeds. Both have online search capabilities, neither worked for the searches I was doing, despite being armed with a street address in one case and a book and page number in the other!

There were lots of people doing research at both places when I showed up in person, more in the much larger Hampden Registry, where they don't even keep paper books for recent years. You can print any page you want, for a dollar, which explains the large sign over the counter showing how much money they're earning in fees. There were even meetings going on in the downtown Springfield registry, with families and lawyers or banker types.

At the Hampshire Registry, located on King Street just up from the intersection with Main, I started with both a street address and a book and page number from the public auction ad. The pages showed that the owner was in default for a mortgage of around $275,000. Following the citations of previous registrations on the page into older books, I found that the electric company has a leased right-of-way in perpetuity (for $1) for the pole and power line, and all the boundaries of the property. Following back further, it became clear that a large property had been willed to two beneficiaries, one of them ended up with the piece that is up for auction now, and took out a big mortgage to build the house that's now at risk. Maybe he'll come up with the money before the time of the auction, I won't be there and I wish him luck.

In the Hampden Registry of Deeds, all I had was a street address, but boy, did that lead to a flood of paperwork. The big trick is knowing the Shift-F8 pulls up a scan of the original document when you're looking at an abstract. Not being a good instruction reader, I asked somebody. I believe Shift-F9 send it to the one dollar printer, so you don't want to do that too much. The house in question has changed hands so many times recently that it's not worth going into, but the most recent registrations included a complaint (I believe this was the first act of the current mortgage company taking it over), a power of attorney (the attorney working for the mortgage company), a foreclosure for a little over $225,000 in unpaid mortgage, an assignment of bid, (this may have been the result of the interim owner winning the house at a previous public auction) and a municipal lien. The municipal lien stretched back three years for over $6,000 in unpaid taxes, and with the current year and unpaid water and sewer fees, it could easily get up to $8,000.

So, I still don't know what I'm doing, but I know a little more than before the two trips. There's a walk-through scheduled for the house on the Sunday before the auction, so I can at least show up for that. It's a large Victorian in a good neighborhood, but in a city that's fallen on hard times and shows no signs of recovering. The opening bid is set for $25,000. Think they'll take $26,000?