[MRM]

You go down to the county courthouse to the register of deeds. You tell the clerk that tyou're there to do a mortgage seach on a property but you don't know how to do it yourself. You hand the clerk the address and ask to help you look it up. The property records are kept in huge bound books with hand written entries for each parcel of property that go back to the begining of time. Or at lest recorded land ownership history in that part of the world. The book will literally go back to the original "land grant," either from the king or government to the original owner.

Anyway, you cross reference the address to get a property ID number. You look up the property ID number in the big book and find the property. It will have listed the current owner and any encumberances on the land - first and second mortgages, easements, special assessments, liens, judgments - the whole works. It is written in a funny format, but the words are pretty much plain English. With a few minutes' work you can tell conclusively who owns the property, how much he owes on it and to who.

Congratulations, you've just performed a real live title search. I used to have to do it as a law clerk back in the early 90s with no more training than a year of law school and directions to the courthouse. It really is that easy to figure out.

These days a lot of counties have the same information on line. The fundamentals are the same but you can do the search from home. To find out whether you can get access over the internet you just need to call your local county register of deeds office and ask if the property ownership and lien information is on line. It probably isn't, so the only free public access is driving to the courthouse where anyone who has the time and inclination can look up all such information for free.

There are pay sites that tap into commercial databases that were compiled by people who gathered the information one property at a time to compile the private database, but you have to pay for the access and I don't know off the top of my head which ones are good. You'd likely pay three or four subscription fees to get it right.

If you can get access to Westlaw or Lexis, both databases have an asset search feature that gives you excellent access to property ownership. Depending on the lawyer's subscription, it might cost anywhere from nothing extra to a few bucks to do the search. That's the only private database I know of for sure that works.

Frankly, I'd do it the old fashioned way and stroll down to the courthouse like any Freeman and ask to see the property records.