Real Estate

When you purchase real estate, real estate title insurance companies will insure your real estate against any “defects” in the title. What this means is that if your ownership of the property turns out to be in any way inferior to what you bargained for when you bought the property and you suffer losses because of it, the title insurance company will make up your losses. A common way that this can happen is if, for example, you buy real estate from a seller who still has a mortgage on the property that you didn’t know about. After you buy the property the person who sold it to you stops paying off the mortgage and the bank forecloses on your property and either throws you off or makes you pay off the mortgage yourself. This is where your need to make a claim to your title insurance company to reimburse your losses.Of course, the title insurance company will check the local real estate recording office to see if there are any problems with your title before you buy the real estate.

If it finds any problems (OK, “defects”, if you please!) in the title, then it will make an exception to its coverage with respect to those particular defects. In that case, you may decide not to purchase the property after all. That’s fine, as long as your real estate sales contract obligates the seller to provide “insurable title” prior to the closing of the sale. It sounds like a foolproof system doesn’t it? But of course it’s not. The title insurance company is normally not going to check the title to the property all the way back to 1678 when the land was granted by the Spanish Crown – they’re only gonna go so far back, maybe 60 years, and just take a chance that no jerk is going to come along and challenge your title based on a remote claim. Another loophole is that the law recognizes some legitimate claims over property cannot be recorded because they are not based on any written instrument such as a deed. Also, some states will not record certain documents such as short-term leases or sales contracts. But if you get your property properly insured by closing, that will be the title insurance company’s problem, not yours.