Title report before the bid, or bid and eat the diligence cost after?

My default is search on everything, because the one file I skipped is the one that had the problem. That's not statistics, it's just what happened to me twice.

The cost argument stops working once you compare $200 to a $9,000 surprise. What actually limits me is turnaround time in slow counties, not the money.

$1,800 to bid on nine files at roughly 40 cents is a rounding error on the deal and a real number if you lose. I'd want to know your win rate with this seller. If you're bidding into a broad auction and winning one tape in six, up-front search on everything is a losing habit. If it's a relationship where you're the first call, it's cheap.

On my side of the business I learn something from every unit. Same idea here, every file you search teaches you what that county's records look like, which makes the next search faster.

I'm still building a list rather than buying, so I've been doing the free version to practice. County recorder searches online where the county puts documents up, plus the treasurer for tax status. It gets you the recorded chain and delinquent taxes on a lot of files for nothing.

What it doesn't get you is judgments and anything indexed by name rather than by parcel, and access varies wildly by state and county. Some counties are fully online back twenty years, some make you show up. So it narrows the tape but it doesn't replace the search.

@bramble that's the thing I hadn't understood until recently. The free work tells you what's recorded against the parcel. The paid search tells you what a title company will insure, and those aren't the same statement.

Reading this thread is a good reminder that I should not be doing this. $1,800 spent to maybe bid, on a five day clock, with judgment searches. I'll take a lower return somewhere with fewer moving parts.

I've been stuck in exactly this loop and it's the reason I have no deals. My answer, which I'm forcing myself to actually use, is a two-tier screen. Free county work on all nine in day one, kill the obvious problems, then paid search on the survivors before I bid.

The cost of that is you bid on fewer files. I've decided I'd rather bid on four files I understand than nine I mostly do.

Does an origination title policy from 2016 do anything for you at all? My understanding is it insured the lender's lien as of that date and says nothing about the four years after, but I might be missing something about who can still make a claim on it.

@quill that's roughly right, and whether an assignee has rights under an old lender's policy depends on the policy terms and on state law, so it's a question for a title attorney in that state rather than something to assume from a scan. What the old policy is actually useful for is the chain before its date. It saves you searching backward, which is often the slow part.

The version nobody likes: ask the seller to extend the window. Small sellers say no about half the time in my experience, and the other half you get seven or ten days and the whole problem changes shape. People treat the bid deadline as physics.

What's an O&E actually, ownership and encumbrance? And is it something I order myself or does an attorney do it?

@rigging ownership and encumbrance, yes. It's a limited search of the public record on a parcel, usually the vesting deed, recorded liens, and tax status, with no insurance behind it. You can order one directly from title companies and search vendors that serve note buyers, or through a foreclosure attorney who'll do a fuller run when you file.

@tally, my default is bid subject to diligence with a written reprice and walk mechanism, then spend real money after exclusivity. What made me adopt it was losing $1,400 on searches for a tape that got pulled and resold whole to somebody else two days before bids were due. I'd rather burn a little seller goodwill than pay to educate myself about files I'll never own. It only works if you actually close the ones you say you'll close, and if you reprice on real findings and not on second thoughts.