More counties opened electronic recording in 2025, and it changes how easements get filed

Traditional recording is a mail-and-counter process: the signed, notarized original travels to the recorder, gets examined, gets a stamp with book and page or an instrument number, and is returned weeks later. eRecording replaces the transport, not the examination. A submitter uploads an image, the office reviews it against the same statutory requirements, and the stamp comes back the same day in many offices.

For easements, the practical effect is the gap between signature and index entry. A shared driveway agreement signed on a Friday and recorded electronically on Monday is discoverable by a title searcher almost immediately. The same document mailed in may not appear in the index for weeks, and that window is exactly when a competing sale or refinance can slip past it.

It also changes who can file. Most offices historically took electronic submissions only through commercial submitters used by title companies and lenders. Consumer-facing services, like the one Kalamazoo County announced, let an individual owner submit an eligible document directly.

Counties publish the document types they take electronically, and those lists are specific. St. Louis County, Minnesota, for example, publishes a coded list of accepted types covering agreements, amendments, assignments, easements-adjacent instruments and more. If your instrument type is not on the list, it goes in on paper.

Rejections are the other half of the story. An electronic submission that fails examination comes back quickly, which is an advantage, but only if someone is watching for it. Common reasons are a missing or defective legal description, an unsigned or improperly notarized page, an incorrect fee, or a missing prepared-by or return-to block.

For an easement specifically, the legal description is where most trouble starts. The description of the easement area has to be sufficient on its own, not merely a reference to a line on a drawing that was never recorded.

Do not rely on a third-party summary, including this one, for the mechanics. Open the recorder, clerk or register of deeds page for the county where the land sits and read three things: whether electronic submission is accepted, which document types are eligible, and the current fee schedule.

Recording fees change without notice, which is why our county guides link to each office's published schedule instead of quoting a dollar figure that goes stale. Call the office if the page is ambiguous; recording staff answer procedural questions routinely.

After recording, get the instrument number and pull the recorded image from the index yourself. A confirmation email from a submitter is not the same as an entry in the public record.