Our process usually starts with an earnest money contract.  We’ll receipt the contract and earnest money and enter the information into our computer system. We’ll also review the transaction with you to ensure that we understand who the new lender will be, whether an attorney will be involved in the closing, whether the property will be homestead property or an investment, and whether a survey has been ordered. We’ll review the closing process with you, and before you leave our office, we’ll provide you with the document copies you need to begin your loan application.

The next step involves entering the contract information into our computer system and assigning the transaction a guarantee file number. We’ll deposit your earnest money into our trust account and your earnest money will be credited to you at closing. We’ll also print an order sheet and take it to our plant department, where they’ll start the title search.

Starting the title search, we’ll search our online plant by name and by the legal description of the property. As part of the name search, we will check the names of both the seller and the buyer. We’ll determine if there is a prior commitment or title policy for the property, and we will update the title from that prior commitment date to present.

During our name checks, we’re looking for issues like tax liens, divorces, lawsuits, judgements, probate, easements, and other events that could affect title to the property. We will check both direct records for people that sold the piece of property and the reverse records for people that bought the piece of property. We’ll also check the District Court records, as well as the Matagorda County Court records, because issues like divorces are filed with the Districts Courts.

Once the research is complete, our title examiner reviews the information, and we make the decision to issue a title commitment. We may find issues during our title examination, which would need to be addressed before a title policy can be issued. If that happens, we advise you of the necessary actions to mitigate these issues. Since we don’t provide legal advice, you may have to hire an attorney to develop cures for the title issues we find.  We’ll also work with our underwriters to ask them what risks they might be willing to accept with particular scenarios.

To prepare for closing, we will order tax statements from each of the local taxing authorities so that we will be able to account for taxes paid and taxes due and prorations, as of the closing date.

Once a title insurance policy has been issued, we will store the records in our file system. Our title insurance files date back to 1952 when the first title policy was issued in Matagorda County.