Oakland County, September 13, 2006 -- Access to property records in the Register of Deeds Office just got a little easier, announced Ruth Johnson, the Oakland County Clerk/Register of Deeds.

Beginning Oct. 1, land documents, deeds, mortgages, tax lien information and other property documents recorded by the county's Register of Deeds office will be available directly from www.landaccess.com.

"This state-of-the-art system is more user-friendly than the online system previously available," said Johnson. "In addition, users can get assistance 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week from an information help line."

Register of Deeds records first went online in 2000 through Oakland County's web site and the "Access Oakland" program.

Today, more than 300 companies subscribe to Access Oakland for Register of Deed documents - including title insurance providers, banks, mortgage companies and attorneys.

Instead of an annual subscription fee of $200, users will now be able to purchase more customer-friendly pricing options. Subscribers, for example, will be able to purchase monthly search packages. Fees will be paid by credit card.

Access to documents will also be available to non-subscribers. The cost will be $5 per search and $1 per document.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Access Oakland at www.oakgov.com may still be used to obtain other information/products from Oakland County including residential property profiles, commercial industrial profiles, the mortgage application acceleration program, delinquent tax statements, the residential property analyzer and the map atlas viewer. Fees vary.

"We want to provide the best service at the lowest possible cost," Johnson said of the online changes.

The Register of Deeds documents available at www.landaccess.com are known as Recorded Document Profiles.

"When they view a document, there is no additional charge to save it to their hard drive or to print it," Johnson said. "They'll have full use of that document. We want to continue to improve customer service - helping people get what they need quickly and efficiently online, rather than standing in line."

The www.landaccess.com web site is operated by the Syracuse-based Affiliated Computer Services or ACS. Government records for 45 counties in Illiniois, New Jersey, Ohio, New York and Pennsylvania are available at www.landaccess.com.

The company was the first in the nation to offer a microfilming system for land records, computerized land records indexing systems and the first to place personal computers in Register of Deeds offices to index land records.