# Title search

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

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](https://searchspheresource.com/glossary/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](https://searchspheresource.com/glossary/payoff-letter) 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](https://searchspheresource.com/glossary/asset-vs-stock-sale) turns into an argument about a truck.

In numbers: A $4M acquisition can carry three [UCC-1](https://searchspheresource.com/glossary/ucc-filing) filings at once: a $510,000 equipment note, a $215,000 line of credit, and one stale filing from a lender paid off years ago that nobody ever terminated.

Source: https://searchspheresource.com/glossary/title-search
Not dated: A definition is editorial: what a term means, why it matters, and an example. None of it reads a source that can go stale, so there is no date to take and a stamped one would be the build time wearing a costume.

Site index for machines: https://searchspheresource.com/llms.txt