Unlike most other insurances, title insurance consists of a one-time fee upon acceptance. You do not have to pay yearly, quarterly, or monthly fees after you make the initial payment.

Most of the work performed by the title company is performed before or just after you purchase your home. Title insurance works as a type of prevention before something goes wrong rather than a safety net after the fact.  By obtaining title insurance, you are starting a process to ensure the property you’re purchasing is free and clear of any encumbrances, liens, judgments, or illegal or improper exchanges in ownership. Essentially, the title search performed by the insurance company is making sure that when you buy the home, you’re buying it from someone who has a legal right to sell it, and that there are no surprise financial costs.

When a consumer obtains a loan from a lender to buy a property, the lender will almost always require title insurance to protect the investment and ensure that they don’t lose the money they’re lending out to you. However, title insurance protects the consumer as well. You don’t want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a home only to find that there’s a pending legal action affecting the property, or that the previous owner didn’t owe property taxes that you are now responsible for, or even that the person who sold the home didn’t legally own it. Numerous nightmare scenarios could land you in deep financial trouble or even mean you lose the home, and nearly any scenario you could think of has happened before. Those scenarios led to the creation of title insurance, to protect both the buyer and the lender from the unexpected nightmare.

By having the insurance, you ease those concerns from the start and ensure that you are free and clear to purchase the home and that upon purchase, it is yours outright. Most title searches are extremely thorough and will uncover anything of concern. However, if something unexpected does turn up years down the road, that title insurance policy will cover your losses. Should anything concerning your rights or title to the property occur, you can recoup your losses.  Get that security and peace of mind knowing you have a title insurance policy in place for as long as you own the property.  All it takes is a one-time fee when you purchase the property to get your owners title insurance policy.  To learn more about title insurance and common questions you might have and common terms explore other areas of our site or give us a call, we are happy to help you.