What is a title company? Title companies search out the history of a piece of property. The real property, with all of its improvements, is how you research a title. A title company is a very unique and...
A title company is a very unique and important company to real estate. The reason people need title companies is to insure one of their greatest investments. A home is the greatest investment that a person usually makes in his life. The purchase of the home goes into hundreds of thousands of dollars. A title company searches the instruments of record which are filed in the recorder's office for a complete record search on a specific piece of property. We go to the county court house, and we receive information on all the instruments that are filed of record on that county. Then, we can index it in our plant according to the property, the geographical, physical property. We can do searches on any piece of property. We are able to search out that specific piece of property, every instrument that is filed on it, and every past owner. So for instance, Trans Pecos, my records go back to 1888. So I am like a large land library. I have every instrument in my county, Brewster County, largest land county in the state of Texas. All my instruments, since l888, parallel the records of the recorder's office in the County Courthouse. My plant is a large library with all those instruments.
As you know, real property is land and anything permanently affixed to the land. A home is an example of real property. If there is a piece of property that has been improved, such as a home has been attached to that land, we will be able to see any improvements. Real property includes that value of the land with its improvements. In a transfer of property, the Warranty Deed, signed by the seller to the buyer, is filed of record in the recorder's office in the County Courthouse. The filed record is all the instruments that pertain to that piece of property. A title company checks, what we call, the filed record.
Therefore, once we know the history behind a piece of property, we are able to provide title insurance to the owner. We issue a policy that would reflect that piece of property's legal description. It is extremely important.
