Union County Clerk Joanne Rajoppi announced today a 30 percent increase in the number of property documents now accessible on the Clerk’s Property Website, bringing to 22 the total number of document types available.
“The addition of eight new document types is a major and substantial addition,” Ms. Rajoppi said. “It provides greater accessibility and information to our clients so they don’t have to leave the familiarity of their computer screens. All of the new document type additions are related to Construction Liens.”
These liens, Ms. Rajoppi explained, were legislated into creation in 1994 and are placed upon real property because a person’s labor, supplies or other goods were used to improve the property without full compensation of their services.
The Clerk’s Property Website at http://clerk.ucnj.org was initiated in 2001 and was the first in the state to pioneer on-line access. The site provides customers with the ability to search documents by name, date range, book/page or instrument number from 1977 to the present in different property categories. More than two million documents are indexed and available for viewing on the site with a total of more than eight million imaged pages.
Documents can now be downloaded free of charge. Customers also can use credit cards to gain certified copies of documents.
Last year, Ms. Rajoppi replaced the website’s server with a newer, more reliable and secure server. In order to protect against identity theft, personal identifiers are redacted before documents are placed on the site.
“My primary priorities,” Ms. Rajoppi added, “are the protection and integrity of residents’ property recordings and the security of their identities. We do everything possible to guard these concerns.”
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