Title company, Road Home not looking at same houses

A move meant to speed up Road Home grants to people whose houses were ruined or damaged by Hurricane Katrina - having a title company get to work independently - hasn't helped much. But officials say it's just a matter of time before it kicks in.

Road Home contractor ICF International has 11,500 files ready for closing. Its title contractor, First American, has completed 26,000 title searches. But, with more than 115,000 applications to work on, there's almost no overlap so far.

Only about 1,500 of the title searches match up with grants ready to close.

"For whatever reason, they just have not matched up," said ICF spokeswoman Gentry Brann. "But when we start getting matches, we'll really start clearing the backlog."

ICF had First American start working independently on title searches at the start of the year.

At the end of 2006, when the program first started to get a sizable number of files through of inspections, appraisals, calculations and verifications, it drew up thousands of award commitment letters.

First American said it could do 500 closings a day. But when it got to work on the otherwise completed files, it was delayed by incomplete land records and limited hours of operations at damaged parish government offices.

The program has closed about 3,000 applications as of March 12, though officials

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