Home Buyers & Borrowers

Home Buyers

SPECIAL ALERT FOR ALL HOME BUYERS

Criminals are increasingly focusing their attacks on the purchasers of real estate. In fact, wire fraud has been recognized as the fastest growing real estate cyber crime in the United States.

Please be cautious and take a moment to download, read, and share this warning about wire fraud!

Foundation Title does not accept, nor do we require, changes to wire instructions by email or fax. Always call our office and speak to a known employee to verify wire instructions.

Secure your property rights with an owner’s title insurance policy.

At Foundation Title, we care about ensuring that you have the peace of mind of decreased risk and increased property rights protection for you home purchase. Your lender may tell you that owner’s insurance is “optional”, and while that may be true, it doesn’t reveal the greater truth, that the lender’s title insurance policy that is required as a condition of the loan only covers the interest of the lender. If you go without an owner’s title insurance policy, you could be subject to monetary losses, or worse, a loss of the interest in your home.

Title insurance is provided by performing research of the public records where your property is located. We search to determine who owns the property and whether or not that ownership is valid. We look for the current owner’s liens, like mortgages and judgments, as well as the liens of prior owners that may have been overlooked when the current owner acquired their interest. We look for other conditions that might affect your ownership interest in the land as well. Some examples would be municipal taxes and assessments, condominium and homeowner’s association liens, tidelands claims by the state, estate taxes owed by prior owners who had passed away while owning the property, and rights of others to use or occupy the premises.

We take all of these various searches and combine them into a report on the title to the property, and in the case where we are engaged to provide title insurance that information is provided in the form of a commitment to insure. We show on the commitment everything that needs to be rectified at or prior to settlement as well as any conditions that will continue to affect the premises, even after you buy it. A simple example of these conditions would be the rights of a utility company to service the power lines that lead to the house. Other times there may be conditions you would otherwise not be aware of if not for the thorough title examination that you would get with an owner’s policy. For example, there could be an easement for access across your premises leading to your neighbor’s property that might not be evident upon visual inspection, but which becomes clear when the public records are reviewed.

Why do I need Title Insurance?

We love what we do for many reasons, not least of which is the satisfaction of preventing homebuyers from walking into a potentially troublesome purchase by providing competent review of the public records. It’s satisfying and humbling to know that the insurance we offer in an owner’s policy has kept someone from losing their home investment because we indemnified them against the interests of others.

What does my owner’s policy protect me from exactly?

Your owner’s policy first and foremost allows you to rest assured in the knowledge that you have hired professionals to proactively take care of any adverse conditions, and that you have acquired indemnification against matters that could affect the title to your property. There are several types of conditions that your policy protects you from:

(NOTE: This list is by no means all-encompassing and coverage is always dictated by the terms shown on your individual policy.)

Mistakes in the public record – From time to time, indexing errors or other mistakes made in recording documents can cause an interest, condition, or lien to go unnoticed.
Forgery – Obviously there are opportunities for forgers to commit many kinds of fraud by recording documents purportedly executed by property owners.
Fraud – aside from the aforementioned forgeries, frauds cause by deception or other schemes can be detected in our searches
Undisclosed interests – Our search for a purchase goes back far enough to exclude the possible rights of heirs to deceased prior owners.
Inaccuracies in the description of the land – Land surveying, historically, has been a variable mix of art and science. Modern surveys using technology tend to be very accurate, but land descriptions can go back centuries. The actual condition of the land, the monuments in old descriptions, the location of natural structures and generally less accurate survey methods, can cause variations in the description of the land. Sometimes, neighbors will find themselves in a position where their descriptions don’t share a common boundary line. In the case where the lines are separated, we call that a gore, and when the cross, we call it an overlap. A diligent property search (and a survey prepared by a licensed surveyor) can help bring these conditions to light so that they can be cured.

Settlement Services

A competent Settlement Agent can make your purchase stress free and enjoyable.

In addition to title insurance, we also offer settlement services in all of the geographical areas we service. We can also support your licensed attorney if they are approved to perform settlements by the title insurance underwriter and lender. If your attorney is not approved, we can assist them with the approval process.

Our settlement professionals work with real estate transactions all day, every business day, and with over 100,000 transactions closed, there are not many scenarios we haven’t seen or that we can’t overcome to get your transaction through the settlement process. No purchase is too complex for us. We take pride in not only getting the transaction done right the first time, every time, but also in being friendly and empathetic to the stress that can come with buying a home. Let us guide you through the process and make your experience delightful.