Round and round

So Cindy’s Prius has been sitting in my driveway collecting dust since last Friday.   The reason for this is she is not the legal owner of the vehicle yet.  You see the one, what we thought was minor bump in the sale was the seller owed money on the Prius yet so he did not have the title in hand.  We thought we had a good plan of action in place, the loan gets paid off, the car stays at my place until the title is cleared off the lien and then we complete the title work.  We figured since Florida went to electronic titling early last year the process should be real fast, bank pays off loan, notifies the state DMV, title cleared, bing bang boom.  Boy were we wrong.

The funds to pay off the loan were moved Friday, the bank officially marked the lien as paid and notified the state of Florida of this on Saturday.  As of of today the electronic title is still locked up tight, showing an outstanding lien, meaning it is unable to be printed or transferred.  Monday and Tuesday I was hoping the title status would flip since the state website says it could take up to 48 hours for the status to update.  It didn’t but I didn’t have much concern since we were still within the published time constraints.

When we went through the entire day yesterday with the status remaining unchanged my concern and aggravation started to pile up.  I was not alone in this concern.  The seller needs the deal to get wrapped up as well since he is relocating across country and was hoping to be on the road heading west by this point.  He and I both were rattling some chains to figure out why this was taking so long.  I called the state DMV customer service number.  After waiting at least 30 minutes on hold I finally spoke to some woman.  I told her the lien was satisfied on May 17th yet the online title check website still shows the title as having a lien on it.  The woman had nothing for me other than the lien satisfaction was not posted yet and that was all that she could tell me. Great.

I was texting back and forth with the seller.  He was on the phone with his bank several times trying to get some sort of answers.  The bank says they electronically sent the lien satisfaction notice as they should have.  The problem is there is no way for us to find out what the deal is in Florida DMV.  We don’t know when the lien will clear or if they even have it in their system to process.  It is very, very aggravating.

I suggested to the seller that maybe his bank could directly contact Florida DMV to either verify they received the communication about the lien or to directly communicate that the lien is now fulfilled.    He said he would give that a shot.  I was surprised when I got a call last night at home from Texas.  It was a rep from the seller’s bank, calling to fill me in on the situation.  She assured me the notification was sent to the DMV on Saturday and that whatever the hang up is, it’s in the DMV’s side.  She said it was possible that they only batch process lien releases a few times a week and we had to wait for the next run to go through.  I told her about the info on the DMV web site saying processing should only take 24-48 hours once the state is notified.  It was very nice of the bank to take the step to reach out to me but it didn’t really give me any more of a definitive answer of why this is taking so long.

You would think when the Florida DMV switched to an electronic only title system, that would mean an increase in efficiency and speed.  After all just clearing a field on a form and submitting it to any location around the globe via the internet takes a matter of seconds.  Why in the world there are days of time that pass before this change is reflected in the system is ridiculous and moronic.  It’s almost like the state has some schlub on a typewriter with a big can of white out that is making these changes manually.

So as of now we continue to be on the same holding pattern that we have been following all week long.  Lesson learned, when buying a vehicle privately, make sure the seller has the title in hand.

I am taking tomorrow off to be the shuttle for Cindy who is having eye surgery.  It will make for a nice 4 day weekend that has a number of activities planned including chores, race timing, and recreational, hopefully evenly balanced.