Video Transcript:
Chain of title reports are a system of going back through the ownership of a property, looking at each owner going back in time, and literally creating that chain of ownership of the property. This is Dave at TitleSearch.com. A chain of title has become a little bit more complex in the last decade. It used to be that if you ran a 50-year chain of title, let's say this was in 1985 or 1990, what you'd find is that property might have been sold once, maybe twice. People kept their house longer. They didn't refinance as much. They didn't move as frequently. Once you got into the '90s and 2000s, people were moving much more frequently and not keeping houses as long, maybe sometimes two or three years. In addition, they were refinancing their mortgage much more frequently, sometimes more than one time in a year during the early 2000s. So that flipping and transition in the '90s and 2000s creates more links in the chain for a given period of time. So a 50-year title search might have seven or eight different links in the chain of title versus maybe 20 years ago might only have one or two. So that chain of title is important to know. Make sure each one of those links in the chain was executed properly. Make sure that all the owners signed off on their deeds properly. So there's no question that somebody's going to come back out of the woodwork later and say, "Hey, I own this property in 1988. I never signed off on it." Running that chain of title can be helpful. If you have more questions about running a chain of title on real estate, you can reach us at our website at title search dot com.