This is a brief summary of real estate contracts. This summary does not cover all aspects of the contract. This video has been made specifically for Real Estate Agents to use as an unofficial educational resource. Nothing in this video is intended to convey legal advice or best practices in any field. This video is only intended to give general advice on broad topics relating to contracts and the closing process at large. For legal advice please contact an attorney and for lending advice please contact a lender.
11. TITLE INSURANCE
It is important to bring up to your clients that we are splitting not only the title policies themselves between buyer and seller, but also the simultaneous issue fee and the binder fee. (The issue fee will not appear on your settlement statement. The simultaneous issue fee is built into the title policy.) This does not include the title search, which is typically the buyer’s responsibility to pay for; the buyer pays for the search, and the seller has to fix anything that’s found. For example, if there was an estate that went bad and didn’t convey properly, then the attorney has to call everyone, file all the deeds, and make sure everything is fixed; it’s the seller’s responsibility to pay for the attorney’s time to have all this fixed.
Sellers are often upset that they have to pay for the buyer’s title policy and the lender’s title policy when they have nothing to do with that, but this is a local custom and is not actually a legal necessity. As such, it is written into the contract, but it is always negotiable and can be amended in the Additional Provisions section if you have a client who is from out of town and isn’t used to paying these fees, for example.
For our full blog post on Title, click here.
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