Recorders face global filing standardization

Changes in real estate document re-cording requirements went into effect Jan. 1, according to Greene County Re-corder of Deeds Linda Montgomery.

Speaking at the Springfield Metro-politan Bar Association's Feb. 20 meeting, Montgomery said, "With changes in technology, recorders are going to imaging systems and different ways of recording documents, so standardization was a natural for those processes." Standard-ization is not just statewide, but global, she said.

The Missouri Property Records Task Force, comprised of the Recorders' As-sociation, the Missouri Bar Association, the Missouri Banker's Association and the Missouri Land Title Association, came up with the standardization proposal for real estate documents, which in-clude warranty deeds, assignment deeds and deeds of trust, Montgomery said.

Some of the changes are:

a minimum of printers' not typewriters' eight point typeface;

signatures in black or dark ink;

names typed under signatures, in-cluding notaries, because improper no-tary signatures and stamps are the most common rejection for filing, she said;

the top three inches of the first page are exclusively for the recorder; and

the first page also includes the title, date, all grantors' and grantees' names, statutory addresses, legal description (which can be continued on other pages with appropriate references), book and pages.

If people don't want to change their standard document forms, a cover page with all the information set out as outlined above can be added for just $3 more, Montgomery added.

There's a $25 penalty for filing non-standard documents, she said.

The biggest problem yet to be faced, she said, is proper designation of grant-ors and grantees, because the recorder is re-quired to keep an index of them.

Confusion comes when parties are set out properly, but are called names such as seller, buyer, assignor, assignee, lessor, lessee, declarant, landlord, tenant, trustor, settlor, trustee, decedent, surviving heirs, borrower, lender, principal or attorney in fact, instead of grantor and grantee.

Montgomery said that the attorney preparing the deed is better equipped to determine exactly who the grantor and grantee are on the document's face.

Montgomery's office recorded 70,000 documents in 2001, she said. The documents recorded in her office include real estate documents and others, such as marriage licenses and wills. Mont-gomery said as far as deeds of trust go, her staff doesn't have time to call and clarify confusing designations.

A pamphlet for formatting changes is available from Montgomery's office in the Greene County Courthouse, 933 N. Boonville Ave.