"Changing times call for bold strategies," Youngblood adds. "It is no longer the era of local banks and title companies serving one county. We now have regional banks and title companies doing business within the metropolitan area. Consequently, our services have to do the same if we are to keep up with the business arena."

Youngblood says offices are working to implement "e-recording" or "e-filing" services in the offices, along with other new upgrades in technology to ease the historically labor intensive process of recording deeds. Eventually, the agreement could allow a person to register deeds for any of the four counties in any one of the offices.

Youngblood says more than 4 million pages of documents are recorded just by the Wayne County Register of Deeds office each year.