By Barbara R. Davis

Best described as an electronic, online courthouse, CourthouseDirect.Com is a website that provides public records online for approximately 900 counties nation-wide. Realtors®, Title Agents, attorneys, and individuals can eliminate surprises, cut costs, and save time associ-ated with obtaining public records in a fast, affordable, and accurate manner by utilizing the services of CourthouseDirect.Com. In addition, for those who don't want to use the online service or who need more help in abstracting and researching land, the company has on-staff abstractors who can do the work for them. Not only is CourthouseDirect.Com committed to revolutioniz-ing the delivery of courthouse information nationwide through the use of the internet, it is also a constantly evolving company with a diverse array of services.

Beginning in1982, Paul Cones started an abstracting company called Courthouse Specialists. Over the years, it has evolved into one of several facets of parent company, CourthouseDirect.Com. These divisions include: Courthouse Specialists, which is their in-house abstracting company; Integrity Title Records, which is their database company that provides databases for Title Agents; Integrity Title Company, which is a licensed Title Agency that is quite unique because it doesn't do closings; and last but not least, CourthouseSquare.com, which is a way for real estate and legal professionals to network nationwide. Since CourthouseDirect.Com began, Paul, who is the company President, along with his wife, Marian Cones, who is the CEO of the company, have united together in making CourthouseDirect.Com a force to be reckoned with!

With over 60 full-time employees at the Houston-based headquar-ters, CourthouseDirect.Com has offices in Texas and Colorado. In Texas, the emphasis has been on building grantor/grantee indexes that one would find in courthouses and for the title insurance community, they build databases - title plant facilities. Using technology,CourthouseDirect.Com has essentially pushed the envelope on how people receive information online. If one was to look at the client list of those who use their databases to do searches, they would see that it's kind of the “who's who” in the real estate, engineering, surveying, and legal community. The fact that CourthouseDirect.com are abstractors and researchers really gives them an advantage in understanding what needs to be extracted from the record and makes their job of building the database really that much better.

Integrity Title Records is the largest Title Plant provider in Texas and is built by and for Land Title professionals. Integrity Title Records provides databases for Title Agents because access to a Title Plant (also known as an Abstract Plant) is a requirement for licensed Title Agents in the State of Texas. An Abstract Plant is used as the basis for the issuance of title insurance policies in the State of Texas and consists of fully indexed records showing all instruments of record affecting lands within the county for a period beginning January 1, 1979. The indexes pertaining to land are arranged in geographic order. Integrity Title Records provides reasonably priced Title Plant access for the following Texas counties: Bexar, Brazoria, Cameron, Collin, Comal, Dallas, Denton, El Paso, Fort Bend, Galveston, Guadal-upe, Hays, Harris, Jefferson, Johnson, Kaufman, Matagorda, Mont-gomery, Nueces, Parker, Potter, Randall, Rockwall, Smith, Tarrant, Travis, Victoria, Williamson, Wise, and more are in the works!

For quite some time, CourthouseDirect.Com basically handled non-insurance type work including doing research for road widening projects, for pipeline projects, for cell towers, telecommunications companies, and just anytime there was need for any kind of land research. In 2003, they decided to provide these services to title companies, so they formed Integrity Title Company, a licensed Title Agency. Considered a different kind of Title Agency because they don't do closings; all they do is land research. They strictly focus on providing services to the Title Agencies doing title commitments - the title examination part of what a Title Agency does.

For about 40 to 50 years, a few major title companies controlled the Title Insurance market of Texas. Previously, in Dallas County, 14 title agents dominated that market. To be a Licensed Title Agency in Dallas County at that time, cost $25,000 a month for title plant access alone. When CourthouseDirect.Com came into the picture, they built a competing database and reduced the cost to about $1,500 a month in Dallas County. Now, the number of Title Agents there has increased from 14 to about 63!

In the desire to push forward and provide the best resource for public records and title information, a new service was recently rolled out called CourthouseSquare.com. It was developed as an excellent source for real estate and legal professionals to network nationwide with one another with free access on a county by county basis. Tradi-tionally, the Courthouse Square was the place where business was conducted. At the local Courthouse Square, one could find an attorney, a Title Company, or a Land Office along with the local cafe or barber shop. CourthouseSquare.com is where one goes to do business today. So, if one was trying to find a local real estate or legal professional in a county, they would go to the county, scroll down to that specific service that they want do business with, and then place an order with them immediately. They're also able to request a quote online. For instance, if one needed a quote on a ten-acre tract that they were surveying, they could ask three or four surveyors to send them a quote. Now that's an innovative way to do business!

CourthouseDirect.Com continues to push the technology envelope in a way others have never before done in the industry. They're fortunate to have very talented computer programmers on their team to interpret what is needed by their researchers and abstractors.

Realtors® and Lenders have an opportunity to own an interest in their own title agency through an Affiliated Business Arrangement and CourthouseDirect.Com can help them by showing them how to do it. In addition, CourthouseSquare.Com’s website allows Realtors® to list their services for free. They can also find other service-based compa-nies on the website that they can do business with, saving them a lot of time by immediately getting quotes and comparisons.

With CourthouseDirect.Com's revolutionary, diverse online services, a Realtor® can eliminate surprises and provide a great service to their clients by making it a practice of going on CourthouseDirect.Com and doing an adverse lien search. Whether the Realtor® gets a contract or is listing a property, a search early in the process will help make sure there aren't any surprises at closing or even after closing and sometimes the problem can be resolved upfront. The best thing of all is that searching is free. It pays to not only prequalify the buyer but to prequalify the seller, too!

For more information on the diverse services of CourthouseDirect.Com, contact Paul Cones by phone at 713-683-0314 or 713-683-0491, by Fax at 713-683-0493, or email at pcones@CourthouseDirect.Com. You can also visit them on the Web at CourthouseDirect.Com.