Title Companies Are Becoming Property Data Companies

Every title insurance policy issued in the United States rests on a search. Before a policy gets written, someone has to establish who owns a property, what claims exist against it, whether prior transfers were valid, and what encumbrances survive the transaction. Title companies have been doing that work for well over a century, building the archives, indexing systems, and verification processes required to answer those questions reliably across thousands of counties with wildly inconsistent record-keeping practices. The result is one of the most comprehensive and rigorously maintained bodies of property information in the country, assembled originally as an internal cost of doing business...