Hammer Time: Titles

by Steven Lang

Updated: May 16th, 2014 Published: January 31st, 2012

I used to love going to the county tag office. Really.

There was a nice little back room where the employees would offer cake and cookies to the neighborhood dealers. In fact, the hospitality for this particular office was so renowned that some dealers in other counties would pay them a visit. Titles would be transacted. Fees to the state would be paid, and a good chunk of those proceeds would go straight to the county coffers.

Not anymore…

New car dealers in Georgia are now transacting their titles electronically. The same is true for all car dealers in the state of Wisconsin as well as many other states throughout this country. A world that has been drowning in paper, ink and ‘duplicate titles’ is now finally entering the electronic age.

Want to go and immediately register your vehicle? Well pretty soon you may be able to without having to do so without waiting weeks, or sometimes months, to get registered. The system developed for new car dealers will inevitably spread to used car dealers… and maybe even individuals as time goes on.

This is bad news for the title clerks. I would roughly estimate that a thousand of them in Georgia alone will no longer be needed. It’s a shame because many of these folks do only good things for the community they serve. I will miss the friendships and the cakes.

Meanwhile the taxes that used to be collected in part by the county will now go straight to the state. Another sad note given that most county governments in my neck of the woods have experienced substantial revenue cuts and furlough days.

There are a few silver lining in all this though. Car dealers may no longer have to worry about lost titles that result in ticked off customers and high title replacement fees from the auctions. Potential fraud issues can also be minimized for individuals. Since the issuance of ‘temporary tags’ can be linked to the existence of a free and clear title.

Most used car dealers and individuals may still have to do out of state titles the old fashioned way for now. But I’m willing to bet that within the next five years, all titlework will be able to be transferred electronically on a national level. Call it a homeland security issue. Call it streamlining government operations. Call it a convenience factor. The outcome is inevitable.

Steven Lang

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2 of 32 comments

Lorenzo on Jan 31, 2012

The only fly in the ointment for me is the potential for the kind of screw-ups and outright fraud like we've seen with mortgages and title for real estate. Some states give the property owner the title, others let the mortgage holder hold the title, though that isn't the system usually for personal property like cars. As potentially quick and potentially efficient as electronic record keeping promises to be, it's still limited to the data entry bottleneck, and Lord help you if somebody misses a key stroke, especially on your VIN.

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56BelAire on Jan 31, 2012

Fond memories(I dated a DMV girl) of the NJ DMV back in the 60s and 70s. The DMV agency we used really catered to dealers and salesmen. Quick service and a special "dealers only" line(no cake though). When delivering new cars, the customer came in, paid, and signed the papers, I would get him a cup of coffee, run to the DMV, get the plates and registration on the spot. Return and slap them on the car took about 15 minutes.....no need for paper temp and extra work. Times changed and NJ DMV is now a nightmare.

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