Risk Management Blog

As the 2011 nears its end, First Corporate Solutions recognizes that many of you are evaluating your expenses and looking for ways to reduce due diligence costs in the upcoming year. To lend a hand, we offer the following suggestions for decreasing your costs for lien searches – without jeopardizing priority or increasing your risk.

Don’t Over-Search
One of the simplest ways to keep lien searching costs down is to be careful not to over-search. Note, First Corporate Solutions is not suggesting that you eliminate critical searches from your prefunding routine. What we mean is, be mindful to limit the searches you perform to only those that are necessary in order to evaluate risk and determine position.

Many times people are unsure about what to order and they are nervous about missing a lien, so they place a service request for EveryTHING EveryWHERE. To keep searching costs to a minimum, make sure that you are searching the right names, for the correct liens in the appropriate filing office.

Self-Search
To drive down costs, try working with a UCC provider that offers a web-based search system. The fees for self-searching on a private online search system are often much lower than those incurred for a manual search of the same records. As an added benefit, many online search systems offer broad-based searching features such as wildcard characters or truncated search logic to help reveal name variations. Broad-based name searching helps reduce search costs by enabling searchers to combine similar names onto a single search report rather than paying separately for each.

Watch Copy Costs
Most public record search companies charge a per page fee for copies of lien documents that accompany your search report. Active names can generate hundreds of dollars in copies that may not even be relevant to your deal. In cases where your search name is common or you anticipate a large number of hits, you may want to order a “listing only” search to start. Then you can review the report and order copies of only those documents that are pertinent to your transaction.

For more tips on reducing copy costs for your lien searches, refer to our blog post, “Keeping Copy Costs Down for Your UCC & Lien Searches.”

Check back next week for our blog post on cost saving strategies for UCC filings!

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