WS Chronicle

Photo by Todd Luck

BY TODD LUCK 

THE CHRONICLE

The Forsyth County Register of Deeds made a little history on Friday, May 5, when it participated in the state’s first full eClosing with a Deed of Trust.

In the test, Karen and Jason Boccardi’s mortgage refinance became the first fully electronic mortgage loan closing in North Carolina.

It’s part of an eClosing pilot program started by Secretary of State Elaine Marshall.

Marshall was at North State Bank in Hickory, where attorneys with the Hunoval Law Firm sent documents electrically for a property in Forsyth County on behalf of their client.  The firm’s owner, Matt Hunoval, said this makes the process cheaper, quicker and easier.

“This is going to change a trillion dollar industry,” said Hunoval. “This is going to render geography meaningless in terms of where the transaction takes place.”

The end-to-end fully digital closing saved the firm from having to mail documents to a contractor who would hand deliver them to the Register of Deeds office.

“I think it’s very exciting to be the first county to be able to accommodate this type of recoding,” said Forsyth County Register of Deeds Lynne Johnson.

Though only in its pilot phase now, the hope is that eClosing will become a regular practice in counties across the state.

“This was our first North Carolina eClosing,” Marshall said Tuesday. “It is not our last. We want this to become a regular option for lenders and their customers because of the many advantages eClosing offers versus the slower, traditional paper-based system.”

Marshall stressed that eClosings have all of the regular features and safe-guards that people see when they execute a mortgage on paper.

“For eClosings we require the physical presence of that notary plus the access to legal expertise –there is zero drop in standards for an eClosing – it is just faster, far more convenient and in my opinion more secure,” she said.

“This is a win-win-win scenario,” she added. “The lender gets their work done quick and easy, the borrower gets in and out on a schedule that fits for them, and the land records get recorded instantly at the county register of deeds. There are no couriers or copiers or travel delays.”