Deed-o-matic

Inspiration

The Deed-o-matic is a tool created for Community Legal Services of Philadelphia’s Home Ownership Unit to more quickly draft deeds for low-income clients by using a guided interview web application. The Deed-o-matic was developed using Docassemble, an open source platform developed by Jonathan Pyle of Philadelphia Legal Assistance.

While the Deed-o-matic saves legal service providers a great deal of time, advocates still need to manually transcribe the old deed data from the public records and input the property description into the updated deed. The challenge presented was to updated the Deed-o-matic to include the following features:

Extend the Deed-o-Matic guided interview to automatically read information from an official deed, and include that information into the final paperwork.
Extend the Deed-o-Matic guided interview to automatically retrieve the deed from public records so that it can be transcribed.

Impact

For low-income Philadelphian homeowners, it will greatly improve the efficiency by which they can resolve tangled titles and keep their family homes in their family. In Philadelphia, over 10,500 homes have tangled titles, primarily in majority Black neighborhoods. Key to resolving these tangled titles is executing new deeds transferring ownership from the estate of the deceased homeowner to their children and other heirs.

For advocates who work with these homeowners, this improvement will cut in half the average time spent drafting a deed from 30 minutes to 15 minutes.

What it does

Using the Docassemble OCR functionality, the Deed-o-Matic transcribes PDFs and retrieves relevant data to include in the final paperwork for transferring deeds.

To automate finding the correct deed record, the Philadox website is scraped and the correct document is retrieved to be transcribed.

How we built it

Jonathan Pyle updated the existing code in Docassemble to provide OCR functionality using the Google Cloud Vision API.

Jonathan also provided code written with CasperJS that can scrape Philadox.

Eric Riese worked on building an open source API called Friend In Deed to search Philadelphia public records for the relevant deed. It will be based on Jonathan's previous code, but updated to use better scraping methods using Selenium WebDriver and provides a base for further use cases.

Challenges we ran into

PDF records may not be transcribed correctly with the OCR function due to poor PDF scan quality, and information being split between document pages.
If you don’t have a paid account with Philadox, you can’t access all of the deeds, and you can’t access any in PDF form.
Some websites are relatively easy to scrape. Philadox is not one of them.
Running the Docassemble system was challenging, especially for a short-term project such as this.