Do you order a title search before contract or write the contingency and let title find it

Reading through a purchase agreement I marked up last week and the inspection period language is where the whole cost question lives.

On land the killers are title, not condition. Old mineral severances, unprobated estates, access by prescriptive use that nobody recorded, tax liens that survived a sale. All of it is discoverable, and the argument for paying 150 to 400 for a search before you sign anything is that you never tie up a parcel you can't convey, you never spend a marketing cycle on it, and you don't burn credibility with a builder by pulling a parcel back.

The argument on the other side is volume. If you're taking twelve parcels to contract a month to close two, front loading title on all twelve costs real money on ten you'd have dropped anyway. A properly written inspection period does the same work for free, since the earnest money is refundable inside it and the title company runs the search on the ones that survive. The cost is time, plus the reputational drag of contracts you cancel.

What makes this actually contested to me is what the contingency is worth in practice. A 21 day inspection period on a rural tract is not long if the county recorder is slow and the estate needs an attorney's read, and how much that clock actually protects you depends on state recording and contract practice. So the free option might not be free.

Where do people land, and does the answer change with parcel size?