Video Transcript:
What are the pertinent pages on a real estate title search? This is Dave at AFX Title, Certified Title Abstractors. When you run a title search, you're going to come across several documents in the land records that will be part of that search. There could be very long, extensive documents. You could have a 30-page mortgage. You may have a 14 or 15-page judgment lien. And on those documents, when you're getting your search, if the county is charging four document copies, then maybe 50 cents or a dollar page, you could end up having $60, $70 in copy charges on top of the price of the search. So in many cases, what will be requested is what's called pertinent pages. And those are the key pages that are attached to the title abstract that will give you the information you want to know. Usually it's the first page. It'll have the grantor, grantee, the book and page -all the recording stamps and doc stamps on that first page. The second page might have some financial information like the amount of a lien, the amount of a mortgage, some of the other basic information. Then you can skip ahead and maybe get the last two or three pages, which are the signature pages. It'll have who signed that mortgage, who are the witnesses, if there's a notary, any other titles, and the legal description. You may be able to take a 30-page mortgage and boil it down to three or four pertinent pages that will give you the information you need to have without excessive copy charges, raising up the price of that search and making it more expensive than it needs to be. If you have questions about researching real estate records, you can reach us at our website at title search dot com.