Running title on seller files before listing catches problems a buyer search would find too late

Title work is often treated as strictly the buyer's side of the fence, an assumption worth revisiting after a listing dies at day 34 over an old lien, costing the agent a fee and the seller far more. A useful test: ask a title shop for a pre-listing search, quoted around $125 a file for a search and a short letter, with no commitment issued and no policy. Run it on eight files before they hit the market. Six come back clean. Two do not. One shows a mortgage from a bank that was later bought out, satisfied in 2011, and never released, the same shape as the case @samantha_ruiz described. Clearing it took an escrow officer about three weeks of intermittent chasing, finished before a buyer ever appeared. The other is the more instructive one. Property held by two siblings, one deceased since 2019, and the surviving sibling had been treating it as entirely hers based on what she'd been told. Whether it actually passed to her turns on how title was held and on that state's probate rules, which is a question for an attorney rather than an agent. Sorting it out took about ten weeks. Discovering that mid-escrow, after a buyer was already under contract, would have been far worse. Total cost for the eight searches runs around $1,000. The two problem files, once resolved, go under contract inside a week of hitting the market and close on schedule. The six clean files return nothing measurable except certainty. The lesson worth keeping is timing: run the search before the photos, not after. Once a seller has seen a list price, paperwork stops being something they want to hear about.