Ran title on eight seller files before listing. Two came back with problems.

Five years in and I'd always treated title as the buyer's side of the fence. Changed that this spring after a listing died at day 34 over an old lien, which cost me the fee and the seller a lot worse.

So I asked a title shop I closed a lot of files with whether they'd run a pre-listing search. They quoted $125 a file for a search and a short letter, no commitment issued, no policy. I did eight.

Six came back clean. Two didn't.

One had a mortgage from a bank that had been bought out, satisfied in 2011, never released. Same shape as the thread @keystone posted. Took the escrow officer about three weeks of intermittent chasing and it was done before we ever had a buyer.

The other was the interesting one. Property was held by two siblings, one died in 2019, and the surviving sibling had been treating it as entirely hers because that's what she'd been told. Whether it actually passed to her depends on how title was held and on the probate rules in that state, so I sent her to an attorney and stopped talking. It took about ten weeks to sort out. Listing it first and discovering that in escrow would have been a disaster.

Cost me $1,000 total. The two problem files were both under contract inside a week of hitting the market and closed on the original dates. The six clean ones, I got nothing out of except knowing.

What I'd keep: doing it before the photos, not after. Once a seller has seen a list price they stop wanting to hear about paperwork.