It is the least visible step in a closing — no visit to the home, no report on its condition, nothing the buyer or seller watches happen — and the one that decides whether the seller can actually deliver what the contract promises: ownership, cleanly transferred. This page is what a title search is, what it looks for, how long it takes, and how it differs from the title insurance it leads to.
The title company or closing attorney searches the public records for the property — county deed and lien records, tax records, and the court records that can sit behind an ownership transfer — and reconstructs the chain of title: every recorded transfer from owner to owner, back through the home’s history. Against that chain it checks the seller’s right to sell. The question is purely legal — can this seller convey clean title to this buyer — which is why the search is not an inspection (the home’s physical condition), not an appraisal (its value), and not a survey (its boundaries on the ground), even though all four happen in the same weeks.
Liens and judgments — claims recorded against the property for unpaid debts, taxes or court judgments, which attach to the home and would follow it to the buyer. Mortgages and their releases — every loan recorded against the home, and proof each old one was paid off and released. Easements and restrictions — recorded rights and rules (utility easements, subdivision covenants) that stay with the property and are listed as exceptions rather than cured. Breaks in the chain — a transfer that was never recorded, a name that does not match, an estate or divorce behind a sale that was never properly papered. Each find lands in the title commitment as either a requirement to satisfy before closing or an exception the buyer accepts.
The search itself commonly takes days to about two weeks, ordered right after the contract is signed so it runs alongside the inspection, appraisal and underwriting. Its written product is the title commitment: the insurer’s promise to issue a policy once the listed requirements are met. Meeting them is the cure — payoffs obtained, releases recorded, errors corrected — and the cure, not the search, is what occasionally stretches a closing. That is why the closing-timeline guide counts title among its four parallel tracks, and why a defect answered in days rarely costs a closing date.
A title search reads the recorded record; it cannot find what was never recorded, forged, or filed under a name no search would connect to the property. That residual risk is exactly what title insurance exists for — the search finds the problems that can be cured before closing, and the policy insures against the defects that survive a proper search. The two are complements, not substitutes, and the separate title-insurance guide on this site covers the policy itself.
Homeowner HQ is the homeowner’s side of the record before a sale is ever on the table: your own agent’s monthly home-value updates keep your picture of your home current, and the fix-my-facts route keeps the facts behind that picture — the ones a future buyer’s title and appraisal work will test — corrected while there is no deadline attached. When a contract does come, your agent reads the title commitment with you: which lines are routine payoffs, which are exceptions you accept, and which need a cure started the same week.
A title search is the review of the public records that stand behind a home’s ownership, run after a purchase contract is signed and before closing. A title company or closing attorney traces the chain of title — each recorded deed transferring the home from one owner to the next — and checks that record for anything that could follow the property to its new owner: mortgages and whether they were paid off and released, liens and judgments, tax claims, easements and recorded restrictions, and gaps or errors in the chain itself, including the probate, divorce and bankruptcy records that sometimes sit behind a transfer. Its question is narrow and legal: can this seller convey clean title to this buyer? It is not an inspection — it says nothing about the home’s condition — and not an appraisal, which is about value. The search’s written result is the title commitment, which lists the requirements that must be met before the title can be insured and the exceptions that will remain on the policy.
Commonly days to about two weeks for a standard home sale. The search is ordered soon after the contract is signed, so it runs in parallel with the inspection, the appraisal and underwriting rather than adding its own weeks at the end. A recently built home with a short, clean ownership history in a county with digitized records can come back in a few business days; an older home with many past owners, paper records, or a problem to cure — an old lien to release, a payoff to document, a name or description error to correct — takes longer, because the curing, not the searching, is what consumes the time. Either way it fits inside the normal 30-to-45-day financed closing window when it is ordered promptly; a search ordered late, or a defect answered slowly, is one of the standard causes of a closing-date extension.
The title company lists it in the commitment as a requirement, and the sale pauses on that item until it is cured — closing does not proceed over a known defect on a financed purchase, because the buyer’s lender requires a title policy without that exception. Most cures are mechanical: a mortgage or lien is paid from the seller’s proceeds at closing and its release recorded; a lien that was paid but never released is cleared by proof and a recorded release; an error in a name or legal description is corrected by a recorded document. The contract supplies the timetable — a cure period for the seller, and a buyer exit if title cannot be made clean — and if a genuine cure needs more time, the closing date moves by a written extension signed by both parties before the existing date passes. A problem found by the search is the system working: found before closing, it is paperwork; the same problem found after closing is a claim.
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