UCC Document Community

I was in a similar situation last year with a bunch of 2019 filings. Filed all the continuations in November 2023, well before the deadlines. The peace of mind was worth it. State filing fees aren't that expensive compared to losing your secured position.

Great thread everyone! As someone who's been doing UCC work for 15+ years, I'd strongly recommend creating a master tracking spreadsheet with filing dates, expiration dates, and continuation windows calculated out. Also consider staggering your renewal dates - if all your filings expire in the same month, you risk missing multiple deadlines if something goes wrong. When I took over our portfolio, I found filings clustered around year-end, so now I spread new filings throughout the year to balance the workload. One last tip: some states allow you to file continuations online, but others still require paper forms - know your state's requirements before you're in the deadline crunch.

Final thought: remember that tax lien searches might need to be done at multiple levels - federal (IRS), state income tax, state sales tax, payroll tax, property tax, etc. Each might be filed in different places.

This thread has been incredibly helpful! I'm putting together a comprehensive due diligence checklist based on all your advice. Just to make sure I understand the workflow correctly: 1) Run UCC search at Secretary of State level, 2) Run separate federal tax lien search, 3) Run state/local tax lien searches, 4) Check for judgment liens, 5) Verify all entity name variations across all searches, and 6) Document everything for the loan file. Is there a typical timeframe these searches should cover? I'm assuming we want to go back further than just the UCC 5-year window since tax liens could have been filed years ago and still be active.

Update: Spoke with our corporate attorney and she confirmed that our equipment clearly falls under UCC definition of personal property. The bank's compliance team was being overly cautious. Thanks everyone for the input - really helped me organize my thoughts before that conversation.

Great to hear you got that resolved! I'm curious though - what specific language did your attorney use to explain why the equipment clearly qualified as personal property under UCC? I'm dealing with a similar pushback from a lender's compliance team on some CNC machinery, and having that legal framework explanation would be really helpful for my own situation.

Bottom line - there's no such thing as "UCC authenticated demand definition" in Article 9. Your legal team is either confused or referring to some other requirement. I'd push back and ask for specific citations.

I've seen this exact confusion before at my institution. What likely happened is someone saw "authenticated record" in UCC 9-102(a)(7) and conflated it with demand letters. But that definition only applies to security agreements and financing statements, not collection notices. Your certified mail approach is probably fine unless your loan agreements specifically require something else. I'd suggest asking legal to point to the exact UCC section they're referencing - my guess is they won't be able to find one because it doesn't exist for demands.

This thread has been incredibly educational - I had no idea UCC terminations were such a critical but often overlooked part of solar lease buyouts. As someone currently evaluating solar options, reading about all these potential pitfalls with lease agreements is making me lean heavily toward purchase instead. The professional insights from Michael Green about exact name matching and verifying the current secured party are particularly eye-opening. It sounds like the key takeaways are: get everything in writing upfront, don't trust the company to handle it automatically, maintain leverage by tying UCC termination to equipment removal timing, and verify completion through independent channels. For those mentioning Certana.ai for document verification - has anyone used it specifically for solar UCC documents, or just general contract review? Seems like having that extra layer of verification could prevent a lot of the filing errors and rejections people are experiencing.

As someone who just went through a solar lease buyout with a different company (SolarCity/Tesla), I can't stress enough how critical it is to stay on top of the UCC termination process. Here's what worked for me: I created a simple spreadsheet tracking every interaction - date, person I spoke with, what was promised, and follow-up dates. This became invaluable when I had to escalate. Also, I recommend requesting the UCC termination language be added to your buyout contract BEFORE signing anything. Once you've signed and paid, your leverage drops significantly. The verification tools mentioned here like Certana.ai are definitely worth considering - I manually cross-checked everything and caught a property description mismatch that would have caused the termination to be rejected. One last tip: if Sunrun gives you any pushback about providing documentation or timelines, remind them that an unterminated UCC filing could potentially expose them to liability issues down the road too. Good luck!