The largest part of our time in representing you will be spent examining various public records to determine the status of the title to the property. We will be reviewing the land records at the Town or City Clerk’s office to see if there are mortgages, covenants, easements and other matters that will affect the title to your property. We will also look at the municipal zoning records to determine what building permits and certificates of occupancy the property may have required. If you know of any significant changes or alterations to the property, it would help us if you let us know about them. Since we do not physically inspect the property we strongly recommend that you have the property surveyed prior to purchase. A search of the land records by an attorney will not disclose the presence of unrecorded easements or improvements which may have been done to the property without a required permit. Further, it will not disclose encroachments of other structures or reveal any rights claimed under the doctrines of adverse possession or prescriptive easement. These matters would be revealed by a competent survey. If you wish, we can provide you with the names of several local surveyors.

After we complete our investigation, we will prepare and issue a Report and Opinion on Title to you describing the results of our search. The title opinion must be issued within a few days of the closing. If you wish to review the title in advance of your closing or you wish a title search to be conducted early, you can request that we do an initial search. We will then do an update within a few days of closing. There will be an additional fee for this update. We recommend that you take advantage of this so we may be able to discover potential title problems early and work to fix them before your closing date.