Recording the Purchase of Your Real Estate

As soon as you buy real estate, it's a must to register it at the recording office or wherever real estate transactions are registered in your particular jurisdiction. If you don't, you could end up losing title to your real estate due to the misconduct of the previous owner or even due to a mistake. If you have bought property (as opposed to leasing it or accepting a mortgage on it, both of which can also be recorded), you will need a properly executed, acknowledged, and delivered deed to your property. In some states, a mere contract for the sale of real estate may be recordable, but since you're going to end up with the deed anyway at the closing of the transaction, recording your deed is usually the best idea. You will have to have your deed notarized.

1. Filing

The clerk at the recoding office will not check to see if your deed is valid, or even whether you actually own the property. - that would only be investigated during legal proceedings in case a dispute arose as to who owned the property, etc. All the recording office does is keep the document and make it available to people who need it. The only thing the clerk will check is what kind of document you are recording.

2. Recording

The recording office will copy your deed and put it into their Official Records in numerical order. So you might end up recording your deed, for example, in Volume 452, Page 209. Beware - the law that governs the recording of an interest in real state varies from state to state, with potentially decisive legal consequences in case your ownership of the property is challenged at a later date. There are "race" statutes, "notice" statutes, and "race-notice" statutes, for example.

3. Indexing

It may have occurred to you that recording deeds in strict chronological order can make a deed almost impossible to locate if you don't already know the date upon which it was recorded. That is why the recording office also prepares a set of indexes recording information about each document for easy reference. Your deed will be recorded in a grantor-grantee index which alphabetically lists recorded documents according to the grantor's (normally the seller's) name and the grantee's (usually the buyer's) name, along with the volume and page numbers where a copy of the deed can be found. It might also include a description of the deed and the property. The recording office will probably also maintain a grantee-grantor index alphabetically arranged by the buyer's name.