Prompted by the recent post here regarding the changing times, as evidenced by the online availability of judicial financial disclosures, Tim DeVault emailed this first-person account from an earlier era of public access. Especially enlightening was his final vignette describing the arbitrary roadblocks that were eliminated when his bureaucratic nemesis decided that he qualified as “local”. In any case, it’s an entertaining and enlightening read.

On the first working day of July, 1979, just ahead a Wednesday 4th of July, in a completely selfless move all things considered, I took to spending all day, daily with no foreseeable end, in the Bureau of Conveyances in the Kalanimoku Building to keep track by hand, for all the real estate data-using public, of all the past day´s bona fide real estate sales transactions in Hawaii for publication. It just was not being done at that time.

Bob Vernon at John Child & Company had sent a girl down to the Bureau to kind of do that some ten years prior but of course it was hell. The commitment had no exit strategy.

Every working day the Land Court system would record at least 200 documents by then on some escalating average, sometimes double that, and Regular System across the hall at least 2 spools or more in 800 frames of microfilmed documents each.

Each bona fide deed, agreement of sale, assignment of lease and other serious assortments needed, for the sake of very real individuals and companies in the information-using public then or soon to be using the company I was packeting the end data to by nightly post, Real Estate Data, Inc in Florida, to be caught, each parcel, on a REDI form with the who, what, when and where, plus the mortgage company and mortgage amount or A/S financing – plus the precise legal description, because each night I had to somehow figure the current tax map key from various hints in that legal description, a slam dunk in most cases and at least ultimately doable accurately in 90 percent or so of the tax key hunts.

It worked. It pissed off Red Morris. His competing affiliate data firm in Santa Barbara, MultiList, was sued so effectively for so freely using our idea for trying for months to invade and do the same thing that MultiList, I heard, had to pay a debilitating penalty because our REDI form for use in the Hawaii Bureau of Conveyances had been slyly copyrighted by REDI.

(There was even a time in 1983 when REDI – MultiList conjoined nationally but that was just the beginning of national tactical maneuvers from hell: later there emerged TRW-REDI; then suddenly REDI selling it´s 37-state operations somewhat intact to Experian; then they selling this same real estate data arm to a mix of bond salesmen in New York City at 100 percent profit, or $2 billion as reported in the Los Angeles Times. First American took over in 1998, as First American Real Estate Solutions.)

The girls MultiList hired to access the Bureau via the title companies turned out to be refreshingly talented and enduring and after REDI raided and totally took over the MultiList Hawaii offices in the Gold Bond Building following years of shenanigans on their part we all got along well, with me at the Bureau and they happily transcribing, without keying help from Fort Lauderdale back in the office and eating chocolates.

When the Honolulu Board of Realtors took over on some us-versus-them overnight vote in Kaimuki, the multiple listing service for Honolulu that MultiList had been running suddenly had to lay off 20 of their people, plus their obstreperous retired half colonel co-manager. This small squad of my hostilely taken over compatriots doing public records immediately formed Neighbor Island Multiple Listing Service, independent of REDI, associating with 2 neighbor island services, Maui and Kauai, then still standing. Today decades later Novena and they still work brilliantly accessing Bureau transactions, as Hawaii Information Service.

Your August 20 www.ilind.net entry describing the new wikileaks-era access to data at the State resonates so well today in the light of the days of 1978. Archie Viela, the Assistant Registrar, would limit every data user including us (actually it was just me because I never asked for help) to five (5) Land Court documents at a time from the Land Court vault! That is, say, 40 special detours begrudgingly sustained every workday in Land Court by a non-caucasian to the vault , often that would have been Nicole, who was actually Portuguese and selectively cheerful but not to you if you had to take sides over who was local.

Archie´s boss, the Bureau of Conveyances Registrar Charles Newmann the 3rd, a German-Hawaiian, finally by 1981 took me into his congenial office on the Regular System side and demanded to see some ID. Once he found out I was local Archie out of the blue simply granted me vault privileges forever and I had merely to grab the prior day´s hundreds of Land Court documents off a chair in the vault and spend half the day standing at the counter. Imua!

Real estate transaction documents at the Bureau of Conveyances still do not have tax map key numbers.