[StBernard] Road Home contractor researched wrong titles

[Westley Annis]

At the beginning of this year, Road Home administrators sought to jump-start
tedious title searches and other end-of-the-process checks that had gummed
up the distribution of aid to homeowners. 

The idea: to get its contracted title company, First American, to start
working on checking applicants' land records before the program's
administrators could separately complete some 40 steps of inspections,
appraisals, calculations and verifications. That way, the often lengthy
title searches would be accomplished simultaneously. 

Trouble is, Road Home contractor ICF international and the title company
have been working almost exclusively on separate cases - so 10,000 files
ready for closing, the vast majority, don't match the 26,000 title searches
now completed.A spokeswoman described the apparent disconnect as an unlikely
coincidence. 

"For whatever reason, they just have not matched up," said ICF spokeswoman
Gentry Brann. "But when we start getting matches, we'll really start
clearing the backlog." 

The total backlog of ready-to-go files need title work was about 11,500 at
the end of last week. Nearly 90 percent of those files don't match the
completed title searches."Those 26,000 or so are ready once we get the
people's option letters back," Brann said. 

In all, the program has closed only about 3,000 of more than 115,000
applications as of March 12, though officials have promised closings will
rapidly accelerate soon. 

At the end of 2006, when the program first started to get a sizable number
of files through its complex review process, it generated thousands of award
commitment letters. First American said it had the capacity to perform 500
closings a day, but it ran into delays when it would try to do title
searches on otherwise completed files. 

Title searchers ran into incomplete land records and limited hours of
operations at damaged parish government offices, creating a new logjam.