Title Searching By A Person's Name

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Video Transcript:

How do you run a title search on a name? This is Dave at AFX Title, Certified Title Abstractors. If you don't need to know specific title information about one property, but you want to find out what a particular person has for property interests, there's a way to run a title search on a name; which in some ways is a little more difficult, in some ways adds complexity. The good news is all of the records that are stored in the land record system, all those documents and pieces of paper that are in books on shelves, are indexed by name to begin with. Even if you're running a title search on an address, you have to start with a name. If you don't have a particular address, you just know, "Here's some guy, Joe Schmo that you want to see what properties they own, what liens there are, what mortgages there are." You can run that name in the name index to begin with and a list of every single document which that name appears on as a grantor or a grantee. Once you have that list, it'll give you the book and page number of every document which appears on the list. From there, you can walk up and down the aisles of books, pull out those books, flip to that page number, and there's your document. It could be a lien... could be a mortgage... could be a release. Make your copies and then organize them by property. You may find that Joe Schmo owns four different properties, and you can sort out all the liens, mortgages, releases, deeds into piles for each property. At that point, you have a pretty good picture of what properties this particular party owns, what status the properties are in. Do they have liens against them? Are they transferred to another party? Did the person just buy them? Are they encumbered with mortgages? Are they in foreclosure? The first thing to start with though, is finding out which properties the person owns. So a title search on a name is a little bit different twist on a typical title search, which is for a particular address, but it does have some advantages if you're doing asset search, asset recovery, maybe even trying to locate a subject. If you have questions about running a particular type of title search, you can reach us at our website at title search dot com.