Thursday, August 30, 2007

What is a title plant?

A title plant, in the traditional definition, is a database of old title policies backed by good title examination. Use of a title plant is part of the normal search and examination process. Why recreate the wheel on every transaction?

We've got our own little title plant. We've got the files for every transaction we've insured back to 1991. Most of them are scanned and accessible on our network while processing a new title order. So, if we find the property in our title plant, we ask our human abstractor aka title searcher to search back to the date of our last title policy. If we have no prior file, we order a full search.

Some title companies have changed their title plants to include data gleaned from courthouse indices and other internet accessible real property related sites. I call these title plants garbage.

Why do I call them garbage? Well, there are no qualified human eyes reviewing the data before it's considered usable. I would not want to rely on a title search using this type of title plant. I take the ownership of real estate too seriously. I want a professional title search because we talking about the roof over a person's head and we're talking about the largest investment in the lives of most families.

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