Ideas in this flowchart

• Deeds and public records support verification of real estate ownership and title
• Deeds provide notice to others about the ownership status of real estate
• A centralized public-record system helps determine whether a seller owns the land and has not previously conveyed it
• Grantor and Grantee Indexes allow a purchaser to trace title through preceding owners
• The purchaser looks up the seller in the Grantee Index
• The purchaser checks the Grantor Index for later conveyances
• The purchaser examines the seller’s predecessors, presumably back to a sovereign patent
• The good lead doctrine requires a property description that identifies the granted land with certainty
• Marketable Title legislation can validate an apparently good title
• A sufficiently long search must reveal no contrary grants or claims, often for thirty or forty years
• Purchasers and financing banks may require title insurance when substantial money is invested
• Title insurance protects against title-related claims, including mistakes in a title search
• Title companies maintain title plants containing property-related title information
• Title companies may produce abstracts of title containing documents related to a piece of property