When to pay for title work on a land parcel that has no buyer yet

What does a title commitment actually cost on a 30k parcel? People keep saying real money and I have no idea if that's 200 or 2,000.

@megan_doyle15 it varies a lot by state and by whether you are paying for a full commitment or a cheaper preliminary search, so call two local title companies and ask for both prices. In some states an attorney does this work instead of a title company, which changes the number again. On the actual question, ordering early is usually the better path, because the situation to avoid is discovering a defect after a buyer has put money up. That costs the seller of the parcel every future deal, not just this one.

Ordering title on day one is the right call, and the case for it is a parcel where the deed description did not close. A surveyor found the east line ran through a neighbor's barn, and that surfaced only on day 24, with a buyer who had already told his lender he had it secured. Getting out clean on an inspection contingency is the good outcome in that scenario. The commitment for title work costs far less than a relationship damaged by a late surprise.

I'm new to this and can't figure out who I'm even ordering from. Do I just call a title company and say open title on this, and do they need something from the seller before they'll do it?

@bmoreno23 you call and give them the parcel number and a copy of the executed contract, and yes, they generally want the contract because it shows you have a reason to be asking. Ask specifically whether they'll do a search for a wholesaler who's assigning, because some offices are perfectly comfortable with it and some are not, and finding that out on day one is worth as much as the search itself.

I voted for the middle option though. Reading the deed and the tax record yourself takes an hour once you've done it twice, and it catches the loud problems for free. Back taxes, a mortgage nobody mentioned, an owner name that doesn't match the person you're talking to.

Thin margins, lots of deals, and I don't open title until I have a buyer at a number. Half of what I put under contract never gets a buyer at my price, and I'm not funding searches on parcels that die. My inspection period is long enough that I can order the day my buyer signs and still get out if it comes back ugly.

@carlos_nunez's barn story is the counterargument and I know it. My answer is that I'd rather lose one buyer occasionally than pay for searches on ten dead tracts a year.

At rural price points the calculation changes. When the parcel is 8k, the search can be a meaningful fraction of the whole deal, so the usual approach is to read the record yourself first and only order once the deal is serious. In some counties the register of deeds has everything scanned online and it is genuinely fast.

@joe_delgado5 and @carlos_nunez are both describing volume, just at different points on the curve. If you're running enough contracts that a dead search is noise, order everything on day one. If you're on your third deal ever and the search is 40 percent of your cash, read what you can yourself and order when a buyer is real. The middle option is simply what a small operation can afford.