Welcome back to our
discussion about how you can become a five-star seller. This month, we've been
talking about the steps you can take to smooth the path in your real estate transaction
and we talked about staging the home, about doing a pre-home inspection, about
why it's important to offer a home warranty.
Today, I’d like to
talk about doing advanced title research for your property. Very often, title
work is only pulled at the tail end of the closing period or the escrow period
as some call it. In Maryland for example, the buyer chooses the title company so
obviously if you don't have a title company, no one's going to pull the title work
until you have a buyer and oftentimes the title company doesn't pull the title
work until a week or even 10 days before settlement.
If there's a title
problem, it's going to show up in the last minute and anytime you have something
show up at the last minute, it stresses everyone out. Usually, title problems
are easy to fix and they don't take a lot of time, but sometimes they do and as
the seller if they take a little bit of time to fix, then your buyer may be
wanting some kind of compensation.
For example, they
might need a hotel stay at the last moment because all of their home is packed
up and ready to go and they have nowhere to live and you can't close on time
because you have a title problem to resolve, so the recommendation here is to
go ahead and hire a strong local title company and your realtor can recommend several
that can pull your title work up front.
It's not an expensive
thing to do. Costing probably between 150 and 300 and the title company can
examine your title for anything that may have popped up since you bought the
property. Typical things include unreleased liens from when you did a refinance,
sometimes you can have things that pop up, judgments, etc. that you least
expect and sometimes they can be in someone else's name but attached to your
property.
Now, I'm not trying
to create drama or fear but we have seen these things happen and as I said before,
typically, they're easy to resolve. Some of them take a day, some of them take
a week but let's get these things known and upfront and out of the way before
you even put your home on the market. Then you know going forward, there's
really nothing that can hold your transaction back.
I would love to see you
become a five-star seller. I am here to help walk you through the process, answer
any questions that you have and feel free to reach out to me at the information
noted below and we'll get you on the market with the least amount of stress.