“It was a little more than a year ago that this newspaper was reporting on the troubles hounding many of the commonwealth’s 21 registries of deeds…The Registries’ turnaround has been nothing less than amazing. Perhaps this is best noticed on our own pages where we report real estate transactions recorded at every deed repository…

Three factors contribute to this remarkable turn in events. First are the people who work at the registries and there unflagging desire to meet the expectations of the public. They responded when provided with the resources necessary to do their job well by plowing through a backlog of work and restoring order to chaos. The second contributing factor is the deployment of technology to accelerate workflow and to reduce traffic in the registries. One example is Norfolk County, where documents are now viewable on the Internet. Finally, a rise in interest rates midway through 2003 brought a slowdown in the volume of transactions requiring recording.

We offer our congratulations to an outstanding group of people who suffered through the worst of times and are now deserving of recognition for engineering successful turnaround.”