A notice from a Delaware company recently was sent to Liberty County property owners, instructing them to obtain a copy of a “grant deed.” The company offered to obtain and provide a copy of the owner’s deed and property profile for a fee ranging from $3 to $63.
According to F. Barry Wilkes, clerk of the Superior Court of Liberty County, the office in which all land records are filed and permanently archived for the benefit of property owners in the county, the services offered by Record Transfer Services in the mailed “deed-processing notice” are available to property owners in the clerk’s office or online. There’s no need to pay a company for the information.
“All that land owners have to do to obtain a copy of their deed(s) to is to come to the clerk’s office in the Liberty County Justice Center. For those who desire to locate land records themselves when they come to the clerk’s office, we provide in-house computers for searching all real-estate databases for deeds recorded from the early 1970s to the present,” Wilkes said. “My staff provides assistance to anyone who needs help finding their deed records. So, I ardently discourage paying an exorbitant fee to anyone to have them obtain a copy of the deed to your property — or for copies of liens and plats.”
The additional information the Delaware company offers to provide owners about their property can be found online, courtesy of the Liberty County tax assessor’s office, at http://gis.libertycountyga.com/flex2/index.html, according to Wilkes.
State real-estate records dating back to 1992 also can be viewed and printed online.
“Superior court clerks created a statewide real-estate information system in 1996 under the auspices of the Georgia Superior Court Clerks’ Cooperative Authority that enables residents of Georgia to access deeds, liens and plats online. A property owner may access his or her land records by going to www.gsccca.org, clicking on the ‘search’ link and following directions. Every clerk of superior court of the state is required by law to transmit daily land records for his or her county to the Superior Court Clerk’s Cooperative Authority, so its database provides immediate online access to all real-estate records of this state,” Wilkes said.
By law, the cost for copies of deeds, liens and plats made in the superior court clerk’s office is $.50 per page if no assistance is required for copying and $1 per page if assistance is required. Copies of any land record printed from GSCCCA’s online database cost $.50 per page.