MOUNT VERNON – Now that all Knox County property records all the way back to 1810 are digitized and stored online, the Recorder’s Office has arranged for county property owners to put alerts on their own records to help safeguard against fraud.
Knox County property owners can sign up for PropertyCheck services on the Knox County Recorder’s website for free to get email or text notifications of recordings on their property. They can activate alerts based on their name, property address or parcel number, County Recorder Tanner Salyers said.
The county took all of its property records and put them online in a project started by Salyers’ predecessor and the Board of Commissioners when the pandemic began.
“We knew that this office had to keep going. And at the time, we had to limit person-to-person contact, and the best way to do that is to take as much of it online as possible,” he said.
The county used CARES Act money for the digitization work, putting all property records online back to June 1810. Some counties are lucky to have digitized records back to the 1980s, he said.
Salyers said it’s an exceptional resource not only for title searchers but also for people who are just interested in finding out more about their deeds and their property.
Current property owners can sign up for PropertyCheck to make sure property, title or identity thieves don’t take advantage of them. Whenever a property changes hands, changes are made on the deed; if a mortgage is paid off and released or affidavits of powers of attorney are enacted with the deeds, the property owner would get an alert.
“Anything pertaining to liability and encumbering of real property is recorded here. Right now, especially because interest rates are incredibly low, people are refinancing, people are taking out loans and using property as collateral using those lines of equity,” Salyers said.
Seniors or other property owners who aren’t paying attention or aren’t familiar with financial markets could be victimized through sophisticated means.
“We are trained to get this stuff before it gets that far, but the more sophisticated they get, the more it slips through and the more and more that they do it, the more chance it comes to slip through,” he said.
Whenever anything is filed on their property or concerns their property in the Recorder’s Office, they would get an alert. Salyers said it would work similar to bank account alerts. The bank notifies its customers about account actions, and the customer can determine whether those are fraudulent.
“We can't stop something that, per se, meets all of our criteria, but we can certainly let you know that something's happening on your property. And at that point, you can get more information from us. And if you need to contact a financial institution or an attorney, then you can do that at the beginning, as opposed to waking up one morning, getting out to the mailbox and finding a notice of foreclosure or, you know, some sort of court situation going on,” he said.
