This episode details ongoing title complications with a Texas property straddling two county lines, where broken parcel boundary overlaps required a $3K+ survey that fortunately revealed 38 acres instead of the anticipated 35. After the first title company refused to insure due to a nonexistent tax lien, missing death certificate, and unclear 1922 marriage records, the team is now working with their third title company to close the deal.
Key Takeaways:
- Never Accept First Title Company Refusal When one underwriter declines a deal, immediately contact alternate title companies (investor-friendly options often exist through networks like Logan Fullmer’s group) as many refusals stem from laziness rather than legitimate risk.
- Cross-County Properties Add Survey Requirements Properties straddling county lines with broken boundary overlaps between jurisdictions almost always require surveys before title commitment, creating $3K+ sunk cost risk if deals don’t close.
- Century-Old Documentation Gaps Aren’t Always Deal-Killers Missing marriage certificates from 1922 represent minimal real title risk given the time elapsed, but finding investor-friendly underwriters willing to accept reasonable risk levels is essential for closing.
Listen to the full episode for the detailed breakdown of working through multiple title companies, identifying lazy underwriting versus legitimate concerns, and knowing when to pivot to legal solutions.
(Podcast transcript below)
Hi, Chris over at Serious Land Capital, vacant land funding partner. Today wanted to touch on some current title issues and how we’re navigating those. And probably will be helpful for a number of you. know properties that might have a bit more hair.
on them from a title perspective are becoming more popular. You know, given what Gwelman-Fulmer and, and Clint Turner are advocating for with some of these messy title deals. You know, they don’t need to be that messy, but yeah, some of these properties that might have some difficulties regarding airship situation or
you know, needing affidavits to be signed and various deaths within the family. You know, even if it’s one owner and there’s multiple owners, those can be, you know, not insanely messy that you need to go through court system to handle it, but can still be trickier to deal with compared to just a simple.
transaction where there’s no real broken pieces within the chain of title or extra documentation being needed outside of the seller’s ID, for instance. So one that we are currently working on a Texas deal here, really interesting property as it straddles
counties, know, the actual delineation line for two of these counties actually goes straight through the property. So part of the title is held within one of the counties and the other piece is held within another county. From my understanding, one of the counties has the kind of primary chain of title.
associated with it, but you know, it’s still added some extra complexity as you can imagine sorting this out. And fortunately, we had a seller to seem to be an error for this property just wanted offloaded again, typical motivated seller and seemed to have a lot of the
documentation that was going to be required by a title company to offload. And fortunately was very cooperative with us in order to get this property sold into our entity. A key issue that we imagined would come up when we were even seeking to purchase the property in the first place is that
there were some broken parcel boundary lines that overlapped each other a bit when split between the two counties. So, it’s technically only a single parcel, but again, because they’re in two separate counties, each county was considering a part of the property to be held within each respective county. And so it wasn’t…
entirely clear what the accurate acreage was. So in order to even get a title commitment on the property, the initial title company we’re working with was requiring a survey to be done. You know, we’ve done this in the past and it’s always some level of risk, right? If you put money down for a survey and it’s still unclear what the full title situation is going to be at the end of it.
you know, there’s some potential sunk costs going into a,
an acquisition target that might not go all the way through. So in this case, you know, we spent just over three grand to get this survey done. And fortunately it came back in our favor as there were, if I memory serves like another, I think it was supposed to be a 35 acre property, according to county records and ended up being just under 38. So, you know, it
came out to our advantage from a price breaker perspective, dropping that PPA a bit on the purchase side. And then when we submitted the survey to the title company, right at the end, their underwriter said they were not gonna be able to ensure the deal, primarily because of three issues. you know.
I was looking through the title commitment and seeing, how hairy is this? We knew it was going to be some level of risk, but is this just an underwriter issue? Can we go elsewhere? And yeah, there’s plenty of times where we run into a snag with one title company that uses a certain underwriter and just go to another one. And like the issue is completely resolved. So, you know, it’s not.
unusual to be hit with something like this. So the first issue was that there was supposedly a existing tax lien on the property that had an attached court record for it. But this didn’t make any sense because we had confirmed all of the taxes were paid off for this property. And we actually went ahead and called the district court and
looked into this further and there was no associated tax suit. was just an error on behalf of the title company. So, you know, that wasn’t the best sign that they were that diligent in their process anyway. Then another piece was needing a death certificate for the seller’s mom, of which the seller did have. So I’m not sure why the title company wasn’t willing to…
work with it from that side. And then the last piece that they were struggling to ensure was what appeared to be the seller’s grandfather had an unclear name. They weren’t sure what his actual last name was. They were trying to find a marriage certificate from 1922, which, you know, as you can imagine something from a hundred years ago, like who really has records for that.
And even though, you know, it would be such a low title risk from, you know, some random person that was an heir from, you know, close to a century ago, ever finding out about this deal, even if they did have some level of equitable interest in the property, you know, title companies, some of them will say, yeah, this is not insurable because of that.
Nevertheless, our seller appeared to have that marriage certificate or at least some proof of who his grandfather was. So the chain of title could be confirmed, but the title company had already indicated, hey, we’re just done with this, tired of working on it. And we were already pretty disappointed. They were slower than anticipated, pulling random out of office emails.
Yeah. Title companies are dying a dozen. I’d say only half of them at best are like actually solid to work with. You know, usually fairly underpaid employees and you know, a lot of them are in super rural areas of the country that just like don’t have the best systems in place here. So, you know, this one was not the best work with from, from the outset. and
So once we had gotten that info, you know, looking at it, and again, we had over 3000 sunk into this deal and it was a very, very solid deal, probably like a conservative 2X gross per hour analysis of it. And, you know, didn’t want to just give up on the deal either. And, you know, we’ve encountered these issues before where, you know, title company doesn’t want to move forward. So what’s next? And.
So then we reached out to our realtor on the deal. Hey, do you know another title company that might be more helpful here? The seller is very motivated. They seem to have all the documentation we can provide this should be able to clear up these previous underwriters issues within the title commitment. So we worked with this other title company and same issue. They were seemingly pretty lazy and they were based in the county that
did not appear to have kind of the full chain of title information package that their abstractor needed that was in the other county. But then they just said, hey, we’re, we can’t be bothered to look at this other county. I’m sorry, we’re not going to ensure this deal either. Again, just kind of reeked of laziness. So to me that that still wasn’t a blocker and we had already had a plan C in place where
The investor who brought us this deal was part of Logan Fullmer’s group. And, you know, they had a list of more investor friendly title companies that are willing to work on more kind of hairy situations. So we’d already been contracted with them to look into it. Plus had a longer call with one of the representatives prior saying, Hey, here’s kind of the situation before we.
dive in deeper here, you think you guys can sort this out and they indicated they could. So that’s where we’re at with this current deal. But yeah, just wanted to share that as sometimes it can be a fine line where, you know, what is the situation where it’s not worth pursuing further or it’s just like a, you know, a much higher risk.
underwriting situation for most title companies, but if it was something like this where, you know, you’re looking for like one marriage certificate from a hundred years ago and the other items seem to be negligible, like that, that to me is so minor that I feel comfortable. Okay, let’s really pursue this as much as we can in order to sort this.
to sort this piece out. And even if no title companies were willing to underwrite initially, it’s not one that we would, especially for the price point we’re getting at, like over a hundred grand purchase price, it’s not one that I would just buy outright without title insurance on it and expect that we could clear it up in-house, maybe for a much lower price potentially, but yeah, not in this case.
but it was also a situation where the type of companies are saying, like consult a real estate attorney might be able to sort this out. And so based on the motivation of the seller, if it really came down to that, likely we could just reduce the price that we’re planning on paying Kim to account for.
whatever legal fees there might be to finally clear up title so that it can be purchased on our company’s behalf. So that is another plan D in case this other title company still is running into issues. again, opportunity costs depending on how much…
You know, money is at stake in some of these deals can be worth diving in further versus not. but you know, just to share, mean, a more recent example here and, don’t always take no for an answer or title companies say, Hey, you need like a foreign LLC to operate here. We always find another one. We’ve never gotten a foreign LLC and we always, we operate across the country. there’s always going to be a different title company that’s willing to work with you. again, title companies are, they’re, mostly a commodity.
If you can find a good one, sure. Yeah. Treat them right. Right. And everything. but there there’s plenty that are just lazy and not that good to work with. And we don’t really bother wasting more time with them. Just move on to, another one. So our two cents on that, if you’re looking for funding, serious land dot capital or land daily diligence, Facebook group for zero cost review of your land deals and landpricer.ai
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