Video Transcript:
Hello, this is Dave again at AFX Title and title search dot com. Question comes up a lot is, what is a certified title search? Well, there are many different ways to do a title search, and actually many definitions of what a title search actually is. A title search is simply a research project done by a title searcher, title examiner, or title abstractor that gives a report to a client of what is going on with the property. But it could mean different things. It might be a current owner search, an owner and incumbent search, or a chain of title. And there's also no industry standards or legal standards about how to do a title search. That's where NALTEA comes in. NALTEA is the National Association of Land, Title, Examiners, and Abstractors, and they have a certified title searcher program. It gives a uniform description of how to do a title search so that a title examiner -title abstractor -has expectations of knowing how to do a search. When you get a certified title abstract, you know that that report was done to a certain industry standards, which means that the client gets some sense of security, that it was done correctly, that the person doing it is not just somebody off the street that says, "Hey, I can do a title search." It was a certified process used to make that search. It pulled records from official land records, not from some third-party online database. It pulled documents in a way that supports the proper name indexing. It matched up liens, and mortgages, and assignments, so you're not missing any documents. It also gives you some sense of security that the report you're getting has value. Because really, when you think about it, a title search is only as valuable as the accuracy. Is a title search that's 70% accurate worth anything? No. It's 100% accurate -what you're looking for. Because if it has a lien or a mortgage, you want to know about it. 70%, 80% -what if the lien was in that 20% or 30% that was missing? That's not going to help you. So a certified title search is one way to make sure that accuracy is there. If you have questions about title searches or about the difference between a certified search and a regular search, you can reach us at our website, titlesearch.com, and we'd be glad to help.