The Mercer County Clerk’s Office is the County’s Official Property Recording Office. The Office of the County Clerk is responsible for the filing and recording all documents affecting real property ownership and transfer within Mercer County. This includes deeds, mortgages, and their related documents, as well as tax liens, powers of attorney documents, and veteran discharge papers known as DD-214.
The County Clerk has maintained records of all documents affecting property since Mercer County’s incorporation in 1838. Any interested citizen, attorney, title searcher, or historian for their research can be granted access to the large records room that houses all of the official property records of Mercer County. The records are available for public inspection between 8:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday, located at 209 S. Broad St. in Trenton.
Although the staff cannot conduct a title search by law, they can help familiarize the public with the computerized recording and indexing system. The County Clerk’s Office offers search room classes every year (although these classes have been suspended recently in light of the COVID-19 pandemic). In addition, maps of Mercer County’s 12 municipalities are on file, along with minor and major subdivisions within the county.
Over the years, the types of records on file at the Clerk’s Office have evolved, as have the methods for recording these documents.
The Clerk Office does accept mail or walk-in paper recordings. Additionally, as part of their ongoing effort to provide thier constituents with the most efficient and accurate services in recording and filing documents, the Mercer County Clerk’s Office offers e-Recording. By utilizing imaging technology and a modern electronic land records management system, the e-Recording system allows individuals to record documents remotely.
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Clerk’s Office has significantly upgraded its e-Recording service. From March 1, 2020, to December 15, 2021, there have been 102,805 records submitted through the county’s e-Recording portal, with an average submission rate of over 5,000 records per month.
The ultimate goal of this program is to allow complete electronic recording of real property, allowing title agencies, mortgage lenders, banks, law firms, and other businesses the ability to record and track the progress of filed documents via the Internet, all from the comfort of their home or office. Subscriptions to E-Recording of real estate documents are available through the county E-Recording portal at http://www.njcountyrecording.com or by calling our office at 609-989-6465.
The e-Recording portal is operated by Sunrise Systems. Many other county clerk offices also use it throughout New Jersey, so if you use it in Mercer, you will be able to use it in many other counties, including Middlesex.
Finally, thier office also offers technology to perform searches from the comfort of your home or office on property records dating back to the 1950s. This has been very helpful to title searchers and others seeking to work remotely during the pandemic. You can reach the Clerk’s public records search engine at http://records.mercercounty.org/.
For more information and updates on office openings and closings in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, please visit the Mercer County Clerk’s website: https://www.mercercounty.org/government/county-clerk or call the office’s main number at 609-989-6465.
