Make sure to read Part One if you haven’t already…
Once I finally got the right office (they were right–it was the Registrar of Deeds) the office lady showed me where the two public access computers were at. I asked her how to find the info that I needed, and after some back and forth between us (she had never tried to find mortgages by date like I was trying to do) we finally figured out what I needed to do. At which point I promptly made my second mistake: I got my training mixed up and thought that I could only input mortgages that were worth $100,000 or less. I just took a zero off the real number–there was a limit, but that limit was $1,000,000. One small zero, one big difference. Who woulda thunk it.
It was a frustrating day, because I kept pulling up mortgages worth more than a hundred thousand dollars, and then would have to click to the next mortgage because I couldn’t use those mortgages (or so I thought.) By the end of the first two hours, I was ready to just go home already. I headed out the door, and on the way home calculated my hourly wage. I registered something like $4 an hour, with the mistaken trip to the wrong office and whatnot all factored in.
When I got home, I e-mailed my supervisor, “If you guys would allow me to pull mortgages worth more than $100,000, I could pull a lot more mortgages.” The response was blunt, “Why are you only pulling mortgages worth less than $100,000? The limit is a million dollars.” Again, ripe tomato red, although this time luckily I was by myself, and my computer didn’t care how embarrassed I was. The next day, I went back to the courthouse and pulled all the mortgages I had missed the day before. I actually made $7 an hour that day, which is above minimum wage (in Idaho anyway.) I started to feel better about the whole thing–more confident in what I was doing, and faster at doing it.
Luckily, most people don’t have such a rocky start to the courthouse research arena–my first day was worse than most. In tomorrow’s blogs, I want to cover some secrets that I found that helped me go faster, more about the research companies themselves, and what it is that the research companies do with the info you are giving to them.