The importance of thorough title searches

This week, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court issued a decision on a topic near and dear to our hearts - title searches. For those who haven’t read all of our blog posts (as hard as that is to imagine), in Massachusetts, an attorney representing a lender must review at least 50 years of public records in order to issue a certificate of title for a property. This title search is done to find any encumbrances on the property, which could mean many things, but generally attorneys are looking for monetary liens or the rights of other to use the premises.

In Cormier v. Murray, the defendant attorney represented a bank that was giving a loan to the plaintiff homebuyers. During the course of the attorney’s representation, he conducted a title search. However, the title search was only done on the property address and did not include searching by the names of the previous owners of the property. Because of this, the attorney missed an encumbrance for $23,931.42, which should have been paid at the time of closing. Because it was missed, the outstanding payment then became the responsibility of the buyer.

The SJC opinion goes into some legal questions to be resolved on remand, but one of the main takeaways is that a title search done only on a property, as opposed to an owner, does not meet statutory requirements and may be negligent. At Levine Law, we are proud of our reputation as thorough examiners who bug our title companies with nitpicky questions, all the better to protect our clients.

Full opinion here: https://www.mass.gov/files/documents/2023/09/07/i22P0102.pdf