By John J. Gleason
Zillow, a real estate marketplace, wants me and other county register of deeds to give it a copy of the title to your home free of charge, and it wants you, the taxpayer, to subsidize it. House Bills 4729-4732 are a package of bills backed by Zillow that would eliminate the statutory fees required for copies and images of data from Michigan property ownership records.
The state sets the fees registrars are permitted to charge to produce documents once requested, a $1 per page/image. Zillow has said it is happy to pay for the reasonable expenses in securing data, but $1 per image is just too expensive. Zillow is estimated by some to make $5.5 billion in revenue this year and is essentially looking for a deal. If Zillow is genuinely looking to pay for reasonable costs, let me share the realities of county government.
First, as registrar, it is my responsibility to keep and secure all public records and produce them when requested. There are costs associated with protecting and producing documents, whether they are digitized or hard copies.
We must dedicate staff to retrieve the documents, technology costs to store them, internet costs to connect them, insurance costs to protect them, not to mention contingency plans to ensure the public records do not get stolen or locked up by a cybercriminal.
That all comes to more than $1 per page. As county commissions continue to cut our budgets, including ours in Genesee County, where my personnel budget was cut by 30% in the fiscal year 2020-2021 — the loss of 3 staff members — the costs in producing public records go up, but we still charge $1.
Zillow is trying to use our county as an example of overcharging companies for public documents. State representatives who sponsor the legislation have claimed to have an invoice from Genesee County to Zillow in excess of $530,000 for copy fees for an entire year of our recorded images. These claims are false.
My office didn’t start making bulk sales to customers until December of 2019. We have no such invoice or correspondence with Zillow, and the cost for one year of Genesee County’s recorded images has been averaging $330,000. We charge everyone the same, $1 per page/image. All you have to do is request it.
We spend tremendous resources to ensure your public documents are safe and secure. In 2019, Genesee County was attacked by malware. While the county lost some data, the public records under my care were not affected. We spent significant resources placing the public records in a cloud-based system offsite, where they remained safe, secure and unaffected by the cyberattack. As a result, I did not have to seek indemnification from the state of Michigan or Zillow. My office upheld its constitutional duty as a keeper of records.
The reality is that your title is a public record that anyone can review, and companies have been accessing it for decades. Zillow wants to disrupt local government as they have with realtors, title companies and mortgage companies.
Zillow wants to publish public records, but why should Michigan taxpayers subsidize companies like Zillow to make a profit while counties must continue to produce, store and secure public records?
Zillow’s lobbyists will tell you they are turning around and giving this information to their customers “free of charge.” If Zillow has their way, we should hand out birth certificates, death certificates, fishing licenses, FOIA requests and other government documents for nothing.
I hope they don't think you and the Legislature are that naïve.
John J. Gleason is the clerk and register of deeds for Genesee County.
*This piece expresses the views of its author, separate from those of North Coast Strategies and those working for the company.
