Title search

Definition

A records check confirming who owns an asset and what is owed on it.

Why It Matters

In a business purchase the search runs on more than real estate. A UCC search at the secretary of state shows every lender with a filed lien on the equipment, the receivables, or the company itself, and those filings survive a change of ownership until somebody releases them. The point is not to discover a surprise at the closing table but to know weeks earlier which payoff letters and lien releases have to be in the file before the wire goes out. A lien nobody terminated is how a clean-looking asset purchase turns into an argument about a truck.

In numbers: A $1.4M acquisition can carry three UCC-1 filings at once: a $180,000 equipment note, a $75,000 line of credit, and one stale filing from a lender paid off years ago that nobody ever terminated.