Title Is a Credit Decision: What Lenders Check Before They Fund an Acquisition or a Development Loan

From the recorded record to the final construction draw

By Michal Mohelsky, J.D., FMVA, Practicing Affiliate of the Appraisal Institute. MMCG Invest, LLC. Published October 26, 2026. Current as of October 26, 2026.

Lenders do not underwrite a property. They underwrite a position in it: a lien, in a stated priority, over an estate the borrower actually holds. Every program text says so in its own language. USDA will not issue a Business and Industry guarantee until the lender certifies that the borrower holds marketable title, that the title evidence addresses every existing mortgage and lien, and that no mechanics' lien has been filed and no suit is pending or threatened (1). SBA has priced the failure. Since September 30, 2025, when a defaulted loan loses money because the lender never obtained a properly perfected and recorded lien in the required priority, SBA can deny liability equal to the guaranteed share of the net loss (2). SBA's purchase center, as quoted by lender counsel, says intervening liens cause more guaranty repairs than anything else (3).

The public record is good at what it holds and silent on what hurts. Nearly 30 percent of title insurers' losses and claims expenses arise from issues a public-records search does not find (4). Thirty-six percent of transactions require extensive, nonroutine curative work (5). Fraud and forgery claims average $143,518 against $26,328 for everything else (4), and 59 percent of title firms met a seller-impersonation attempt in 2025, against 28 percent in ALTA's previous study (6). Against all of that, claims paid were about 3.6 percent of the industry's $18.5 billion of 2025 premium (7). Title risk is cheap to insure and expensive to leave to the record.

On a development loan, title is not cleared at closing. It is re-underwritten at every draw. In California, Nevada and Texas, visible site work before the construction deed of trust records can subordinate the entire loan to every mechanics' lien on the project. Florida keys priority to a recorded notice of commencement, and Ohio to that notice or the first visible work, whichever comes first. Colorado counts design work nobody can see. New York gives no relation back at all (8). The ALTA 32-series and 33 endorsements insure only advances that have been disbursed and documented (9), so the real protection is recording before the first shovel, lien waivers with every draw, and a date-down each time money moves.

Written for SBA 7(a) and 504 lenders, USDA B&I lenders, bank and debt-fund construction lenders, and the developers and investors who sit across the table from them. 35 minute read.

A lender never owns the building it finances. It owns a position in it: a lien, in a stated priority, over an estate the borrower actually holds. Title is how that position is proven, and on a development loan it has to be proven again every time money moves. What the record holds, where it goes blind, what the commitment and the policy actually promise, and why the draw period is where lenders lose priority.

Near the bottom of the collateral section of most commercial credit memos, ours included, sits a sentence that reads roughly: title to be cleared at closing per lender's counsel.

The sentence is true as far as it goes. Counsel will clear title, or the deal will not close. What the sentence assumes is the problem. It treats title as a formality that happens to the file after the credit decision has been made, when every program text we work under treats title as the credit decision's physical form. USDA does not guarantee a Business and Industry loan; it guarantees a loan secured by a lien the lender has certified, in a priority fixed in the conditional commitment (13). SBA does not decline a 7(a) loan for a collateral shortfall, as we set out in the collateral flagship, but it will reduce or refuse the guaranty for a lien that was never perfected, never recorded, or recorded behind something that arrived in the interval (2). A bank's examiner reads a construction file for the same thing, and the Comptroller's Handbook tells the examiner to look for a title policy updated with each draw so that the title company has confirmed no intervening liens before funds move (12).

So the question a lender is actually asking of a title file is not whether the seller owns the property. It is three questions, in order. Who holds the estate, exactly as vested, and is that the entity signing the mortgage? What sits ahead of the proposed lien, recorded or not, and what will it cost to move? And does the position survive the period between the contract and the last dollar advanced, which on an acquisition is a few weeks and on a ground-up project can be two years?

This piece answers those three questions from the record outward. It starts with what each lending regime requires at the end of the file, because that is the standard everything upstream is built to meet. It then walks the recorded record itself, what a county index holds and how it differs by state, and the places the record goes blind. It sets out the six signals that reshape a credit before anyone pays for a commitment, reads the commitment and the policy the way a lender should, and spends its longest section on the draw period, where the law of mechanics' liens turns a recording date into the whole loan. It closes with what the development lender is underwriting beyond title, where this file touches the construction-loan study and the equity question we have published separately, and with what we do differently in a title-sensitive file.

One vocabulary point before the substance. A title search, an ownership and encumbrance report, a title commitment and a title policy are four different things, and the confusion between them is where most of the bad advice in this subject lives. A search is work. An O&E report is an uninsured summary of that work. A commitment is an insurer's offer, conditional on requirements being met. A policy is the insurance. Nothing in this article, and nothing MMCG produces, is any of the four; we build the analysis that tells a lender whether to pay for them, and what to ask for when it does.

Start where the file ends, because the standard at the end is what the work at the beginning exists to meet.

USDA writes the standard most plainly. To obtain a Loan Note Guarantee, the lender must certify that the borrower has marketable title to the collateral, subject only to the rights of the guaranteed loan and to exceptions the Agency has approved in writing. Where required, necessary or prudent, the borrower must deliver a title opinion or title insurance showing good and marketable title and fully addressing all existing mortgages or other lien defects, restrictions or encumbrances. The regulation then adds a sentence that matters enormously on timing: where there is adequate gap coverage, a title commitment may be acceptable. And it requires the certification lenders most often underestimate, that no claims or liens of laborers, subcontractors or suppliers have been filed against the collateral and no suits are pending or threatened that would adversely affect it (1).

Two other provisions in Part 5001 complete the picture. Lien priority is fixed at the conditional commitment stage, not at closing: the conditional commitment must identify the lender's lien priority, and a parity or junior position is a case-by-case Agency decision taken during loan approval (13). And the guarantee is unenforceable to the extent a loss results from the lender's failure to obtain, perfect, document or maintain the required collateral or security position (13). Through the life of the loan, the lender must remain mortgagee and secured party of record and must maintain its liens and their priority while servicing (14). An existing senior lien, a mechanics' lien or a pending suit therefore has to be found before the conditional commitment, because after it the lender is certifying against its own guarantee.

SBA arrives at the same place by a different road. The SOP has never, in any text we have been able to verify, contained a paragraph that says a lender must obtain a title policy in every case. What it contains is a presumption. The eligible passive company rules tell a lender that a terminated mineral lease should be removed from the Title Policy, and where it cannot be, the lender must obtain an endorsement such as CLTA 100.23 or 100.24 to protect SBA's interest (16). SBA counsel describe practice as an expectation of a lender's policy on primary real estate collateral being purchased or refinanced, and no set requirement on secondary collateral (16). We say this carefully because the point is routinely overstated: treat a lender's title policy on primary collateral as standard practice backed by guaranty-repair risk, not as a quoted SOP rule.

The repair risk is the enforcement mechanism, and in September 2025 it became explicit. Procedural Notice 5000-872764 let lenders sell loans into the secondary market after filing a required lien but before receiving proof of recordation, and attached a price: if the loan defaults and there is a loss resulting from the lender's failure to obtain a properly perfected and recorded required lien with the required priority, the lender is subject to a full or partial denial of liability equal to the guaranteed share of the net loss (2). The regulation underneath it, 13 CFR 120.524, releases SBA from its guaranty where the lender failed to comply materially with a Loan Program Requirement or failed to close, service or liquidate the loan prudently (15). SBA's own purchase center lists the failures that cost lenders money, and the first group is lien and collateral issues: failure to obtain the required lien position, failure to properly perfect the security interest, failure to fully collateralize when collateral was available. Counsel quoting the National Guaranty Purchase Center put it bluntly: no area causes more repairs to the guaranty than intervening liens (3).

Banks and debt funds have no guaranty to lose, but they have examiners and investors, and the standard they are held to is the same one in supervisory language. The Interagency Guidelines require a written real estate lending policy that covers loan closing, disbursement and collateral administration, sets requirements for feasibility studies and sensitivity analyses on development projects, and limits the use of interest reserves (10). The Comptroller's Handbook on commercial real estate lending describes the construction file an examiner expects: inspection reports with each draw, lien waivers with each draw request, retainage, and a title policy updated with each draw (12).

Put the three regimes side by side and the end-state is identical. The lender needs an insured, first-priority lien over an estate held by the entity that signed, with every senior encumbrance either paid, subordinated or approved, and it needs to be able to prove that position on the day it funds and on every day it advances. The lien is the loan. Everything else in the title file exists to establish that the lien is where the lender believes it is.

The American title system is local in a way that surprises people who have only ever seen the output. There is no national land registry. Roughly 150 million non-federal parcels are maintained by about 6,700 land-records stewards, including more than 3,200 counties and county equivalents (17). Each recording office keeps its own index, on its own platform, with its own document codes, and its digital index begins on a date of its own choosing. Los Angeles County, the most populous county in the country, states on its own website that it does not provide online access to its real estate records or indexes at all (21).

Two index designs matter. A grantor-grantee index is organized by name: to trace a parcel you follow each owner's name forward and backward through the books. A tract index is organized by the land itself. Most recording offices still index by name, which is why a misspelled grantor, a trust whose trustee changed, or an entity that merged out of existence can break a chain that is perfectly sound in law. The examiner's craft is largely the craft of bridging those breaks with affidavits, probate orders and merger certificates, and the public record does not do it for you.

What the record holds falls into eight classes, and a lender who can read them can read most of a title file without counsel. Conveyances: warranty, special warranty and grant deeds; bargain and sale and quitclaim deeds; trustee's, sheriff's, referee's and tax deeds that mark a foreclosure or a tax sale; deeds in lieu; personal representative's deeds out of an estate; corrective deeds. Security instruments: mortgages, deeds of trust, Georgia's deed to secure debt, construction mortgages, assignments of rents, modifications and subordination agreements. Security transfers: assignments of mortgage and substitutions of trustee. Terminations: satisfactions, releases, reconveyances and partial releases. Involuntary liens: federal and state tax liens, mechanics' and materialmen's liens, abstracts of judgment, association and code-enforcement liens. Distress: lis pendens, notices of default, notices of trustee's sale, certificates of sale. Rights and restrictions: easements, covenants and declarations, plats, memoranda of lease, options and rights of first refusal, environmental covenants, UCC fixture filings. And the administrative residue that makes the rest intelligible: affidavits of death and heirship, powers of attorney, certificates of trust.

The same instrument wears different clothes depending on the state, and the clothes decide how fast a lender's problem becomes a loss. In deed-of-trust states, among them California, Texas, Arizona, Virginia, Colorado and Washington, a paid loan ends with a reconveyance and a defaulted one proceeds non-judicially: a recorded notice of default, a notice of trustee's sale, a trustee's deed. In mortgage states, among them New York, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Ohio, a paid loan ends with a satisfaction and a defaulted one goes to court: a lis pendens, a judgment, a referee's or sheriff's deed. The difference is not academic. Using ATTOM's fourth-quarter 2025 figures as reported by Nolo, a Texas foreclosure averaged 154 days from first notice to completion and a Virginia one 160; New York and New Jersey averaged 1,998 days and Louisiana 3,461 (20). Those are secondary figures and residential ones, and we label them as such; commercial loans run through the same state procedures, so the order of magnitude carries over. In a non-judicial state the distress signal arrives late and close to loss. In a judicial state it arrives early and sits for years.

A lis pendens is the instrument most often misread in this regime split. In Florida it usually means a foreclosure has been filed. In a deed-of-trust state it more often marks a quiet-title action, a partition suit or a contract dispute, which is a litigation signal rather than a credit one, and a screen that treats the two alike will send a lender chasing the wrong file.

Price is the other thing the record does not hold evenly. In the commonly cited non-disclosure states, consideration is not public: Alaska, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri by county, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Texas, Utah and Wyoming (19). Published lists conflict, and some wrongly add Washington or Arizona, so the right practice is a sourced, per-county table rather than a memorized state list. Where a documentary transfer tax is stamped on the deed, as in California, the price can be inferred from the tax; where it is not, the sales history a vendor sells you is an estimate wearing a decimal point.

And then there are the codes. Each recorder labels documents in its own shorthand. Alameda County's index, to take one example, abbreviates a reconveyance to "recon," a notice of default to "not def" and a deed of trust with assignment of rents to "d tr w rnts" (18). Multiply that by 3,200 counties and the national datasets lenders buy from ATTOM, Cotality or First American are, at bottom, very large mapping tables from county shorthand to a standard taxonomy, and the mapping is where errors enter. When a lender's screen says a property has two open mortgages, the honest question is which county's code was mapped to the word open, and by whom.

The statistic that should sit at the front of every discussion of title data is this one: in Milliman's analysis of more than 127,000 claims on policies issued between 2013 and 2022, nearly 30 percent of title insurers' losses and claims expenses arose from issues that were not found in a public-records search (4). That is not a measure of sloppy searching. It is the structural share of title risk that lives outside the index. A lender who believes the recorded record is the whole picture has, on that evidence, seen about seventy percent of the loss.

The blind spots are specific, and they recur in the same places.

Missing releases. A loan is paid off; the payoff reaches the lender; the release never reaches the recorder. The chain reads clean to the eye and carries a senior lien that is, in law, probably unenforceable and, in practice, a Schedule B requirement someone has to clear. Examiners handle it by inference: where an arm's-length sale with a new purchase-money lender follows a mortgage, the prior lien is presumed satisfied, on the theory that a closing cleared it. That presumption is exactly what it sounds like. No data product can turn it into a fact, and the ones that display "no open liens" as a conclusion are displaying an inference as a finding.

MERS. Where Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems is the mortgagee of record, no assignment is recorded when the note moves between MERS members (22). The originating lender appears in the index; the current holder does not. A screen that reads MERS as a lender has read the wrong entity, and a screen that infers the servicer from the originator is guessing.

Wild deeds and name variants. A grantor who never appears as a prior grantee breaks the chain. So does a trustee substitution, an entity conversion, or the same person spelled three ways across four decades of a name index (23). These are curable, usually with a bridging document, but the index does not know that a bridge exists.

Name-indexed liens. A federal tax lien attaches to all of a taxpayer's property and is filed against the taxpayer's name in the office the state designates, not against the parcel. A judgment lien does the same. A parcel-centric search finds neither unless the search also runs every prior owner's name through every relevant office for the lien's life. This is the single most common reason a cheap search and a title commitment disagree.

The index start date. Every county's digital index begins somewhere, and before that date the history exists on microfilm or in books. Vendor language about complete transaction history is bounded by that date whether the vendor says so or not.

The gap. Between the commitment's effective date and the moment the insured mortgage is recorded, anything can be filed. The gap is why USDA accepts a commitment only where there is adequate gap coverage, and why insured closings carry a gap indemnity.

Content that needs the image. An index entry says that an easement was recorded in 1987 at a book and page. It does not say where the easement runs, how wide it is, or whether it crosses the pad you intend to build on. The Colorado title company Land Title Guarantee puts it plainly in its own customer guidance: an O&E report does not provide enough research to locate easements (25). Legal descriptions without a parcel number compound the problem; Zillow's own documentation of its recorder data concedes that where instruments carry only a legal description, systematic parcel mapping is not possible (26).

This is the right place to explain the products, because the market sells three things that look alike. An ownership and encumbrance report is an uninsured snapshot of owner, open mortgages and liens; one vendor puts the average cost near $90 and the range at roughly $56 to $275 by location (24). A full search runs the chain back thirty years or more and prices accordingly. A commitment is the insurer's offer to issue a policy, conditional on the requirements in Schedule B, Part I being met, and it is the only one of the three on which a lender can rely at closing. The O&E tells you whether to spend the money on the commitment. It does not substitute for it, and no product that reads the index without images can.

We make this point at length because it is the honest boundary of our own work. The pre-commitment screen we are building into MMCG Analytics reads indexed instruments and shows a lender, parcel by parcel, what was recorded and whether a release or cancellation was located in the index as of a date. It carries a confidence band on every derived status and a verify-in-commitment label on every panel. It is not a title search, an abstract or an O&E report, and it does not say that a lien is open or clear. It says what the record shows and what the record cannot show, which is the question a lender needs answered before it decides what to order.

A commitment, a survey and an appraisal together cost real money and three to six weeks. Most of what kills or reshapes a credit can be seen before any of them is ordered, from the recorded record and the state's corporate registry alone. In our files it comes down to six signals, and they are worth stating in the order a credit officer acts on them.

The first is vesting. The owner of record, read exactly as vested, is or is not the seller under the contract, and in an SBA eligible passive company structure is or is not the entity that will hold the real estate and lease it to the operating company. A mismatch is deal-shaping, not diligence-shaping. USDA's marketable-title certification runs to the borrower's title, and the SBA structure assumes the EPC owns what it is pledging (1)(16). A forfeited or administratively dissolved LLC in the owner's chair is an immediate flag, because a dissolved entity cannot convey until it is reinstated, and reinstatement is a closing requirement nobody has budgeted for.

The second is the lien load against value. This is where title arithmetic meets the collateral math we set out in the collateral flagship. Under SOP 50 10 8, improved real estate counts toward collateral adequacy at 85 percent of market value less prior liens, unimproved land at 50 percent, and the collateral threshold fell from $500,000 to $50,000, so liens and title work now attach to essentially every loan of consequence (16). The 8.1 technical update is reported to have reinstated the SOP 50 10 8 collateral language (30). Every recorded senior instrument therefore reduces collateral value dollar for dollar at the 85 percent line, and the personal real estate test, which excuses a property only where equity is below 25 percent of fair market value on loans above $350,000, has to be substantiated from sources beyond the borrower's personal financial statement (16). Recorded mortgage data is that source. On a conventional loan the same count feeds the loan-to-value test directly.

The third is active distress. A lis pendens, a notice of default, a notice of trustee's sale, a tax-certificate sale or a real-estate-owned deed on the subject, or on any property a principal holds, changes the go/no-go and the timing. It also becomes a disclosure question: SBA Form 1919 asks whether the applicant, its affiliates and each principal are presently involved in any legal action, including divorce (27), and USDA's guarantee certification covers suits pending or threatened against the collateral (1). Distress found after the commitment is ordered is a problem; distress found after the certification is signed is a guaranty problem.

The fourth is involuntary liens. Federal tax liens are the sharp end. The IRS filed 214,099 notices of federal tax lien in fiscal 2025, up from 157,323 in fiscal 2022 (28), and each attaches to everything the taxpayer owns. Property-tax delinquency is the broad end: Cotality's 2026 report puts the delinquency rate among non-escrowed mortgages at 5.2 percent for the year to date, and finds a state-level correlation of 0.54 between tax delinquency and 90-day mortgage delinquency (29). Unpaid property tax primes a mortgage in most regimes. Mechanics' liens are the noisy end; many are routine and released, and the ones worth a lender's attention are the unreleased ones above a size threshold and inside the last year of construction. Judgment liens and association liens round out the set. All of them must be paid or released at or before closing, and the USDA certification names the mechanics' lien category expressly.

The fifth is a recent or non-arm's-length transfer. A quitclaim, a nominal or undisclosed consideration, a grantor and grantee who share a manager or a mailing address, or a resale inside twenty-four months all go to the same questions: what is the purchase price actually supported by, and is this an insider structure the appraisal has not been told about. Practitioner summaries of the SOP describe a six-month look-back for real estate transferred to a spouse or children before application; we could not locate that wording in the SOP text we reviewed, and we treat it as unverified until we can (16). The six-month rules we could verify are the ineligible-person and conflict-of-interest look-backs, which are different provisions aimed at different mischief.

The sixth is rights of record. An indexed easement, declaration, memorandum of lease, option or mineral lease tells a lender that something restricts the land. It does not tell the lender what. The SOP requires lenders to weigh how covenants and restrictions affect value and marketability, naming deed restrictions, easement provisions, subordinations and lease options among the documents to review (16). The index can only say that such documents exist. Their content comes from the commitment and the survey, which is why this signal routes work rather than deciding it.

There is a seventh item that is not a signal but a warning, and we build it into every panel: where the record cannot see. A MERS mortgagee, a history that predates the county's digital index, a price that is not disclosed, a legal description that did not resolve to the parcel. Absence of data in those cells is not absence of risk, and a screen that greys them out is doing a lender a favor.

The commitment is where the record becomes a contract. The 2021 ALTA Commitment for Title Insurance has three parts a lender reads in a fixed order (31). Schedule A states the effective date, the proposed insured, the amount, the estate being insured and the name in which title is vested, and the legal description. Schedule B, Part I lists the requirements: payoffs and releases of existing liens, the entity authority documents that prove who may sign, recording of the insured mortgage, and whatever curative work the examiner wants done. Schedule B, Part II lists the exceptions: the easements, covenants, survey matters and uncleared liens the policy will not cover. The commitment terminates if the Part I requirements are not met within the stated period, 180 days in the ALTA form and six months in many issued versions (31).

Read that structure as a lender and the rule is simple. Requirements get cleared. Exceptions get priced. A Part I item is a to-do list the seller or borrower has to finish before the insurer will issue; a Part II item is a risk the lender is being told it will carry. The work of title review is moving items from the second list to the first, by demanding cures, or getting the insurer to insure over them, by endorsement or affirmative coverage, or deciding they are acceptable and calling them permitted exceptions in the purchase agreement.

The policy that issues at closing is one of two forms, and lenders routinely let buyers skip the one that matters to them. The 2021 ALTA Owner's Policy and Loan Policy, version 01.00 effective July 1, 2021, remain the national base forms; no later base-form revision has issued through October 2026, and the activity since has been at the endorsement level (9). The loan policy insures the lender's debt: loss is capped at the lesser of the policy amount, the unpaid indebtedness and the diminution in the collateral, and the coverage follows the note to successors and securitization trusts. The owner's policy insures the equity, and it does not run to a later grantee by deed. The practical consequence is that a lender's policy vanishes at payoff and never insured the owner's equity at all, which is why a buyer who relies on it has bought nothing, and why every purchase agreement should carry an owner's policy on the buyer's side however the premium is allocated.

Standard coverage comes with standard exceptions: parties in possession, unrecorded easements, survey matters, unrecorded mechanics' liens, and taxes or assessments not yet shown. Extended coverage deletes them, and the deletions are bought with documents. A survey certified to the insurer removes the survey exception, usually replaced by specific exceptions for what the survey shows. An owner's or seller's affidavit covering possession, unrecorded leases, recent work and unpaid contractors removes the parties-in-possession and mechanics' lien exceptions. A gap indemnity from the seller removes the gap. Each of those documents is a representation someone is now liable on, and a lender should know who.

The endorsement set is where commercial title work earns its fee. For an acquisition loan, lenders typically ask for ALTA 3.1 (zoning, including compliance of existing structures), 8.2 (recorded environmental protection liens), 9 (restrictions, encroachments and minerals), 17 (access), 18 or 18.1 (the land is its own tax parcel or parcels), 19 (contiguity, on multi-parcel deals), 25 (same as survey), 26 (subdivision) and 28 (easement damage or enforced removal). A buyer taking title through an LLC, or admitting new equity, adds non-imputation in the 15-series. A ground lease requires the 13-series leasehold forms. Where minerals are severed, the 35-series covers damage from extraction. For a construction loan the set changes: 3.2 and 9.7 are written against the plans for improvements to be built, and the 32 and 33 pairing, which we come to below, carries the draw period (9). The version dates matter and are moving. ALTA re-issued the 9, 9.7 and 9.10 loan endorsements on the 2021 forms effective August 1, 2025, revised 28 on April 2, 2025, and added 22.2 for unimproved land addresses on January 2, 2025; the current endorsement chart is version 3.04 of August 19, 2025 (9). Counsel who cite endorsements by number alone, without the version date, are citing something the underwriter may no longer issue.

The survey has moved too, and most lender checklists have not caught up. The 2026 ALTA/NSPS Minimum Standard Detail Requirements, adopted in October 2025, took effect on February 23, 2026 and supersede the 2021 standards for any survey contracted on or after that date (11). They add an optional Table A Item 20, a tabulated summary of conditions and potential encroachments, reword the relative positional precision definition, expand the reporting of access restrictions and of easements listed in the commitment, including easements that may have terminated without a recorded release, and drop the requirement that the insurer furnish adjoiners' deeds. A lender whose closing checklist still asks for a 2021 ALTA/NSPS survey is asking for an out-of-date product, and the objection deadline in the purchase agreement should run from receipt of both the commitment and the survey, because the survey is what converts an index entry into a line on a drawing.

The cost is smaller than most borrowers expect and set by regulators more than by risk. Texas promulgates its rates, and cut them 6.2 percent effective March 1, 2026 after a larger cut ordered in 2025 was enjoined before it took effect (32). At the current Texas table an owner's policy runs about $9,286 at $2 million, $38,216 at $10 million and $114,516 at $50 million, and a loan policy issued simultaneously with it costs $100 under Rate Rule R-5 where the loan does not exceed the owner's amount (32). Florida's promulgated schedule has not changed since 2002 and prices a $10 million owner's policy at $26,325 (33). New York's TIRSA zone-one rate puts the same policy near $30,300, a figure we take from a secondary transcription of the manual (34). California underwriters file their own rates and we found no public schedule to cite, so we give no California figure rather than estimate one. On a $10 million acquisition, in other words, the owner's premium runs roughly 26 to 38 basis points of price, paid once, for the life of ownership. A vendor figure of $51,835 for a $10 million Texas policy circulates online; it does not reconcile to the March 2026 table and should not be cited (32).

Set that premium against the loss experience and the economics of the product become clear. Industry premiums reached $18.5 billion in 2025, up 13.8 percent, and claims paid were $667 million, about 3.6 percent (7). First American's 2025 annual report reserves at a 3.75 percent ultimate loss rate for the current policy year, reduced to 3.0 percent by releases from prior years (35). Premiums grew 16.1 percent in the first half of 2026, and ALTA attributed the second quarter's strength largely to commercial transactions (7); First American reported commercial revenue up 21 percent to $297 million in the third quarter of 2026, with 22 deals carrying more than $1 million of premium each (35). Title is a low-frequency line. What makes it a lender's problem is severity.

The severity is fraud. Fraud and forgery made up 21 percent of claim dollars in Milliman's 2013 to 2022 sample, and the average fraud or forgery claim was $143,518 against $26,328 for everything else; on loan policies the fraud figure exceeded $194,000 (4). The 2026 ALTA seller-impersonation study, 245 title professionals across 40 states, found 59 percent of firms had seen at least one attempt in 2025 against 28 percent in the prior study, 45 percent had seen one in the previous month, and vacant land was the target in 82 percent of cases (6). The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center recorded $275.1 million of real-estate fraud losses in 2025 across 12,368 complaints, and $3.05 billion of business email compromise, which is the mechanism by which closing funds go to the wrong account (36). The commercial version of this risk is an absentee entity owner of unencumbered land whose signatory nobody has met. The controls are not exotic: entity formation documents and good standing, an incumbency certificate, independent verification of the signatory's identity, callback confirmation of wire instructions through a number sourced independently, and a closing protection letter, which is the insurer's indemnity against its own agent's failure to follow closing instructions and against theft of funds.

Two regulatory notes close the acquisition side. FinCEN's residential real estate reporting rule, which would have required reports on all-cash transfers of residential property to entities and trusts from March 1, 2026, was vacated nationwide on March 19, 2026 in Flowers Title Companies v. Bessent; the government appealed to the Fifth Circuit on May 11, 2026, FinCEN's current guidance is that no reports are presently required, and because another district court upheld the rule, reinstatement is a live possibility (37). No commercial real estate reporting rule exists. And the Corporate Transparency Act's beneficial-ownership regime no longer reaches domestic entities: a final rule effective August 14, 2026 made the exemption for U.S.-formed companies permanent (37). The entity-verification work in a title file is therefore the lender's own work again, with no federal report to lean on.

One last variant, because it changes who signs the opinion. Iowa prohibits private title insurance on Iowa land and issues state Title Guaranty certificates instead; Nebraska reserves paid summaries of the record to registered abstracters; North Carolina defines abstracting or passing upon titles as the practice of law and bars non-lawyer website providers from doing it; Florida lets anyone issue a property information report provided it carries the statutory liability legend (38). None of these changes the commercial risk allocation. All of them change who is allowed to tell you what the record says, and what they are allowed to call it.

Everything above describes a position proven once. A development loan has to prove it repeatedly, because the law of mechanics' liens gives a class of creditors who did not exist at closing a claim that can reach back in time to a date before the lender's mortgage was recorded. Whether it reaches that far depends on the state, and the difference between the states is the difference between a first lien and a subordinated one.

The rule that decides it is relation back. In project-wide visible-commencement states, every mechanics' lien on the project takes priority as of the first visible work on the site, regardless of when the individual claimant started and regardless of when the lien was filed. California does this under Civil Code section 8450, Nevada under NRS 108.225, and Texas under Property Code section 53.124 (8). A construction deed of trust recorded after a grading crew has been on the site is junior to every lien that later attaches to the project, down to the last subcontractor. Nevada's Supreme Court closed the obvious escape hatch in the Fontainebleau litigation in 2012 by refusing to let a lender use equitable subrogation to reorder priority (39). A single day of visible work before recording can subordinate the entire loan.

Notice-of-commencement states move the trigger from the dirt to the courthouse. In Florida, liens relate to the recording of the notice of commencement, the owner must record it before work begins, and work must start within ninety days of it; a mortgage recorded before the notice has priority, and one recorded after it is at risk (8). Ohio keys the lien to the earlier of first visible work and the recorded notice of commencement, and section 1311.14 protects a construction mortgage recorded before both, a detail we flag for confirmation against the statute text (8). The notice is a lender's friend only if the lender controls its timing, which in practice means the mortgage records in the morning and the notice in the afternoon, never the reverse.

Claimant-specific states are kinder to lenders and harder on draw administration. In Georgia, North Carolina and Washington, each lien relates back to that claimant's own first work rather than to the project's, so a mortgage recorded before a given subcontractor arrived keeps priority over that subcontractor; Washington goes further and protects advances under a previously recorded mortgage against intervening liens (8). Illinois keys priority to the date of the owner's contract, so a general contract signed before the mortgage recorded primes the mortgage (8). New York stands alone: there is no relation back, a lien is effective on filing, and a mortgage recorded in the window between commencement and the filing deadline is subordinate unless it carries the statement section 13 of the Lien Law requires (8). Arizona gives the construction lender a ten-day window after commencement to record and keep priority. Colorado is the outlier in the other direction: liens relate back to the first work under the owner's contract whether or not it was visible, so an architect's design work before closing can prime a mortgage recorded on a site nobody had touched (8). Utah ties priority to the first preliminary notice filed on the State Construction Registry.

This is why the lender's and the underwriter's practice on a ground-up loan looks the way it does. A no-work-commenced inspection, with dated photographs and owner and contractor affidavits, is taken at or immediately before recording; Louisiana codifies the affidavit and requires it within four days of the mortgage, and Arizona's ten-day rule is the same instinct written into a statute (8). Site work, surveying stakes, demolition and even material deliveries wait until the deed of trust is of record. In Colorado, design contracts are reviewed for the same reason. The sequence is a condition precedent, not a courtesy, and in our construction studies it appears in the project schedule: land closing and mortgage recording on one date, notice to proceed on a later one.

The loan policy on a construction loan carries a pending disbursement clause: it insures only amounts actually disbursed, and its coverage grows with each advance. The instrument that grows it is the date-down. At each draw, the insurer issues an ALTA 33 disbursement endorsement, which moves the date of coverage forward and increases the amount of insurance to the total advanced; issuing it requires a title continuation to confirm nothing intervened and proof that the prior draw's lien claimants were paid (9). Paired with it is one of the ALTA 32-series construction loan endorsements, which insure priority for each advance made through the date of coverage, including priority over unrecorded mechanics' liens, but only for charges designated for payment in the draw documents (32), or paid directly by the insurer (32.1), or paid directly by the insured (32.2) (9). Read that limitation carefully, because underwriters wrote it on purpose. The 32-series does not insure the lender against mechanics' liens in general. It insures priority for the specific amounts the lender has disbursed and documented, and underwriters describe the structure as deliberately keeping the policy from functioning as a payment bond. Work performed after the date of coverage, and amounts not designated in the draw package, are outside it.

So the endorsements are the last layer, not the first. The first layer is recording before commencement. The second is the draw package itself: an application for payment, an inspector's certification that the work is in place, and lien waivers from the general contractor and every subcontractor and supplier in the draw. The waivers come in four forms, conditional and unconditional, progress and final; a conditional waiver is signed before payment and becomes effective when the check clears, an unconditional waiver only after it has. Several states mandate statutory waiver forms, among them California, Texas, Georgia, Arizona and Utah, with Florida requiring a statutory final payment affidavit, and a non-conforming waiver in those states may be unenforceable (40). The third layer is retainage, which the Comptroller's Handbook describes at ten to twenty percent of each payment, released against completion (12); private-project caps and release deadlines vary by state and we have not verified them, so a study should take the figure from the construction contract rather than from a table. USDA writes this discipline into the regulation: borrower equity goes in before any guaranteed funds, every draw requires certification that contractors have delivered lien waivers, monthly construction reports are required, and problems must be reported to the Agency within fifteen calendar days (41). We covered the draw mechanics, the interest reserve and the loan-in-balance covenant in the construction-loan study and will not repeat them here beyond noting that a title date-down and a draw certification are the same event seen from two desks.

Three other encumbrances belong to development and not to acquisition, and each is a lien-priority question in disguise. Commercial property assessed clean energy financing is collected like a property tax and can prime an existing mortgage; most state enabling acts, Texas's among them, condition the assessment on the written consent of existing mortgage holders, and SBA prohibits C-PACE liens on property securing a 7(a) or 504 loan altogether (42). Special districts, Texas municipal utility and public improvement districts, Florida community development districts, California Mello-Roos districts, levy assessments that are co-equal with or senior to private liens; they are underwriting cost items that the policy excepts, not title defects, and a pro forma that omits them has understated the tax line (42). And a ground lease turns the collateral into a leasehold: a recorded memorandum, a ground-lessor estoppel and recognition agreement, the 13-series endorsements and a check that any fee mortgage is subordinate or subject to non-disturbance. Severed minerals in Texas, Oklahoma, North Dakota and Colorado call for a mineral title report and the 35-series; plats, dedications and legal access are cleared under the 26 and 17 endorsements before closing. For the land-selection side of the same question, see Buying Land You Can Actually Build On.

One honest gap. We looked for a public dataset that isolates mechanics' lien or construction-loan claims within title losses and found none; ALTA reports total claims paid and Milliman reports cause-of-loss shares, but neither publishes a construction-lien share (4)(7). A lender wanting that number has to take it from its own underwriter or its own portfolio, and a study that quotes one without a source has invented it.

Title tells a lender what it will own if the plan fails. The rest of the development file is about whether the plan works, and the two are joined at the loan size, because the lien is only worth what the completed project is worth and only as senior as the record lets it be. This section is deliberately shorter than the subject deserves. We have written separately on the construction-loan study, on the equity question and on SBA collateral, and what follows is the part of development underwriting those pieces do not cover: how the loan is sized across lender types, the regulatory frame that sits behind the sizing, and the market as it stands in October 2026.

A development loan is sized to the lowest of five tests, and in 2026 the one that binds is rarely the headline. Loan-to-cost is the number borrowers quote; banks typically close at 60 to 75 percent of total budget, debt funds at 70 to 85, HUD 221(d)(4) at 87 and SBA 504 structures up to 90, with the bank figures being practitioner ranges rather than rules (48)(51)(53). Loan-to-value on the as-stabilized appraisal sits inside the supervisory ceiling. Debt yield at stabilization, commonly 8 to 10 percent and above, and debt service coverage, 1.20 to 1.35 times on conventional terms, 1.15 on HUD and 1.15 as the 7(a) baseline, test the same cash flow two ways. And the exit test asks whether the permanent loan available at stabilization, at the then-current rate, retires the construction loan. With permanent coupons where they are, the exit test is the one that most often sizes the deal, and a sponsor who models only loan-to-cost discovers that in committee.

How land counts toward equity is the structural variable most often argued about, and the answer differs by regime. For HVCRE purposes, contributed real property counts at appraised value, net of liens (43). A bank's internal policy frequently credits land at cost if recently acquired, or the lesser of cost and appraisal. SBA 504 lets land that is part of the project property count as the borrower's contribution (51), and USDA measures balance-sheet equity rather than project equity, at 10 percent for an existing business, 20 for a new one, and 25 where the guarantee is requested before construction is complete (50). The same parcel can satisfy one test and fail another, and the title file is where the land's basis, its liens and its vesting are established for all of them.

The sponsor is underwritten on three things: comparable completed projects of the same type and size, a balance sheet that can carry the project through a slow stabilization, and guaranties. Net worth at or above the loan amount and unencumbered liquidity of 10 to 15 percent of it are common covenant levels in practice, not rules. The guaranties are a completion guaranty for lien-free completion and cost overruns, a payment or repayment guaranty that may burn down at stabilization, a carry guaranty for interest, taxes and insurance, and an environmental indemnity that survives repayment. Banks generally take recourse; debt funds and HUD are typically non-recourse with the usual carve-outs; SBA requires personal guaranties from owners of 20 percent or more, and the SOP combines a spouse's and minor children's holdings for that test (16).

Behind the bank's own policy sits the regulatory frame. The Interagency Guidelines cap supervisory loan-to-value at 65 percent for raw land, 75 for land development, 80 for commercial and multifamily construction and 85 for improved property, require that disbursements not exceed actual development outlays, and let a bank carry loans above those limits only within an exceptions basket of 100 percent of total capital, with the commercial, agricultural and multifamily subset capped at 30 percent (10). High-volatility commercial real estate, an acquisition, development or construction credit before the property produces income, carries a 150 percent risk weight unless the borrower has contributed at least 15 percent of the appraised as-completed value in cash, marketable assets, paid development expenses or land, before the bank advances and locked in until the loan converts (43). The March 19, 2026 Basel III re-proposal had not been finalized at our last check, and we could not verify whether it changes HVCRE treatment (52). The 2006 concentration guidance still sets the screens examiners apply, construction and land development loans at or above 100 percent of capital, or total commercial real estate at or above 300 percent with 50 percent growth over three years, and the 2023 policy statement on accommodations and workouts tells banks that a loan restructured on reasonable terms will not be classified solely because collateral value fell below the balance (44). Repayment capacity, guarantor support and a current valuation drive classification. Title drives none of it directly and all of it indirectly, because a lien that is not where the bank believed it to be is a valuation problem the examiner will find.

The market in which all of this is being applied is tight and expensive. In the July 2026 Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey, standards on construction and land development loans were basically unchanged on net, demand was weaker, and the Federal Reserve reported that banks' standards sit at the tighter end of their range for every loan category except commercial and industrial (45). Bank construction and development balances stood at $453.5 billion at June 30, 2026, down 3.4 percent on the year, 3.25 percent of total loans against 7.93 percent at the 2008 peak; the construction noncurrent rate of 0.99 percent has moved above the all-loan rate of 0.93 percent while charge-offs stay low (46). Construction input prices were up 11.2 percent year over year in September 2026 on the Associated Builders and Contractors reading of the producer price index, the largest annual gain in nearly four years and driven by tariffs on metals and by energy (47). Alternative lenders held 53 percent of CBRE's non-agency closings in the first quarter of 2026 against 19 percent a year earlier, easing to 38 percent in the second quarter as banks came back (48). Broker rate sheets at the end of September put national banks at roughly SOFR plus 275 to 400 basis points on construction and debt funds at SOFR plus 400 to 550, practitioner figures with no official index behind them (48). Over all of it hangs the $875 billion of commercial mortgages maturing in 2026, 17 percent of the $5.0 trillion outstanding, which is where the exit test gets its teeth (49).

In that market the feasibility study has moved from a nicety to the document the file turns on. The Interagency Guidelines require a bank's lending policy to set requirements for feasibility studies and sensitivity and risk analyses on development and construction projects, and name vacancy, interest-rate and expense sensitivities (10). USDA requires an independent study by a consultant acceptable to the Agency for any guaranteed loan above $1 million to a new business, a definition broad enough to catch almost every ground-up project, and may require one on any loan (50). SBA, as we have said at length, may require one under 13 CFR 120.160(b) and mandates one nowhere (51). The Comptroller's Handbook adds the sentence that explains why lenders order their own: feasibility studies commissioned by the borrower may be biased and should be critically reviewed (12). What the study has to show is the demand drivers and the competitive set, the supply pipeline, achievable rents or rates and occupancy, the absorption path and the stabilization date, and a stabilized net operating income under sensitivity. Stabilized NOI sets the coverage and debt-yield tests; the absorption timeline sets the interest reserve and the term; the downside case sets the guaranties. Title enters the study at the land line, the tax line and the sources and uses, and a study that cannot say what sits ahead of the lender, what the special district will assess, and on what date the mortgage recorded relative to the first visible work has left the lender's position unanalyzed.

The reasons development loans die are the same ones that were true before the market tightened, applied more strictly. Equity below policy, or equity that depends on an appraised land uplift the lender will not credit. A budget with thin contingency, missing soft costs or an undersized interest reserve. A stabilized coverage or exit test that fails at a stressed rate. Feasibility evidence that is thin or not independent. A sponsor whose liquidity does not match the scale. A contractor without a bond or subcontractor default insurance. Entitlement or environmental risk still open at closing. And a bank already at its concentration screen. None of those is a title problem. Every one of them is found in the same file the title work sits in, and the lender that reads the whole file at once underwrites the deal it is actually making.

None of this changes what a title company does. It changes what a feasibility study has to contain before the title company is engaged, and what it has to reconcile to afterward. Five things, in the order a reviewer looks for them.

Pull the recorded record before the commitment is ordered, and put it in the study. The vesting as recorded, the conveyance history with consideration where it is public, every recorded security instrument with its lender and original amount and whether a release was located, every involuntary lien and distress filing, and the rights of record that exist in the index. Each line carries a confidence band and an as-of date, and the panel says what the index could not see. A lender who reads that page knows what to order and what to ask counsel to chase.

State the regime on the first page. Deed-of-trust or mortgage state; judicial or non-judicial foreclosure; disclosure or non-disclosure of price; and, on a ground-up project, the mechanics' lien priority rule that governs, with the statute. A study that does not say whether Colorado's invisible-work rule or Florida's notice of commencement applies has not told the lender when its mortgage has to record.

Reconcile recorded debt to the sources and uses and to the collateral math. Every senior instrument that will be paid at closing appears as a payoff line; every one that will survive appears in the lien stack with its priority; and the SBA collateral calculation at 85 percent of value less prior liens, or the USDA discounted-collateral coverage, is shown with the recorded figures, labeled as recorded original amounts rather than estimated balances. Where a balance is estimated, the study says how.

On a ground-up project, sequence the recording. The study's schedule shows the land closing and the mortgage recording on one date and the notice to proceed on a later one, identifies any notice of commencement or registry filing the state requires and who controls its timing, and budgets the 32 and 33 endorsement pairing, the lien-waiver cycle, the retainage and the date-downs inside the draw schedule, reconciled to the schedule of values that will drive the draw requests. We set out that reconciliation in the construction-loan study; here the point is that the title cost line and the draw administration line are the same line.

Name what is unverified. The SOP provisions we could not confirm against primary text are labeled as practitioner-sourced in the study. The lien-priority rows we could not verify are flagged. Premium figures that come from a secondary transcription say so. A reviewer who sees that discipline on the unverified items will believe the verified ones, and a reviewer who finds a confident citation to a paragraph that does not exist will believe none of them.

And say, in the study, what the lender's position actually is. Not what the property is worth, which the appraisal says, and not whether the plan works, which the market and financial chapters say, but what the lender will hold if it funds: a lien, in a stated priority, over an estate held by a named entity, proven as of a date. That sentence is the whole subject. The rest of the title file exists to make it true.

The controlling SBA origination document is SOP 50 10 8.1, issued by Information Notice 5000-880695 on August 14, 2026 and amended by Technical Updates under Information Notice 5000-882227 on September 25, 2026, effective October 1, 2026. Secondary sources conflict on the trigger: the August notice is consistently reported as applying to loans assigned an SBA loan number on or after October 1, while several summaries of the September notice describe applications received on or after that date. We state it as loans numbered, or applications received, on or after October 1, 2026, and lenders should confirm against the notices themselves (16). SOP 50 10 8, effective June 1, 2025, governs earlier files. The collateral provisions discussed above are reported to carry into 8.1 unchanged; the 8.1 closing chapters, which is where any general title-policy requirement would sit, were not available to us in full and remain the open item in this piece.

USDA's Part 5001 reflects the amendments effective November 29, 2024 and a technical correction of December 11, 2025 that did not touch the closing, collateral or construction provisions (1)(13)(41).

On the title side, the 2021 ALTA Owner's and Loan Policies remain the base forms and the endorsement chart stands at version 3.04 of August 19, 2025 (9). The 2026 ALTA/NSPS survey standards have been in force since February 23, 2026 (11). Texas basic premium rates have been at the March 1, 2026 table since that date (32). FinCEN's residential reporting rule remains vacated pending the Fifth Circuit appeal filed May 11, 2026, and the Corporate Transparency Act exemption for domestic entities has been permanent since August 14, 2026 (37).

On the bank side, the Basel III re-proposal of March 19, 2026 is not final (52), the July 2026 Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey is the latest available and the October survey had not been released at our cutoff (45), and the FDIC's second-quarter 2026 Quarterly Banking Profile is the latest balance data (46). We refresh this section quarterly and on each SOP, ALTA or Part 5001 event.

Does SBA require a lender's title insurance policy?

Not in any paragraph we have been able to verify. The SOP presumes a Title Policy exists on real estate collateral, in the eligible passive company mineral-lease rule, and SBA counsel describe practice as an expectation of a policy on primary real estate collateral being purchased or refinanced. What SBA does require, since September 30, 2025, is a properly perfected and recorded lien in the required priority, with a denial equal to the guaranteed share of the net loss if the lender cannot show one. A title policy is how most lenders prove it (2)(16).

What does USDA require on title at closing?

A lender certification that the borrower has marketable title subject only to the guaranteed loan and approved exceptions; a title opinion or title insurance showing good and marketable title and addressing all existing mortgages, lien defects, restrictions and encumbrances, with a gap-covered commitment acceptable; and a certification that no mechanics' liens have been filed and no suits are pending or threatened against the collateral. Lien priority is fixed in the conditional commitment, and the guarantee is unenforceable to the extent a loss comes from failing to obtain, perfect or maintain the security position (1)(13).

What is the difference between an O&E report, a title commitment and a title policy?

An ownership and encumbrance report is an uninsured snapshot of the record, typically under $300. A commitment is the insurer's conditional offer: Schedule B, Part I lists what must be done before it will issue, Part II lists what it will not cover. A policy is the insurance itself. A lender can rely only on the third, and should use the first to decide whether to pay for the second (24)(31).

Can a mechanics' lien beat a recorded construction mortgage?

In many states, yes. In California, Nevada and Texas every lien on the project relates back to the first visible work, so a deed of trust recorded after site activity began is junior to all of them. Florida keys priority to a recorded notice of commencement, and Ohio to that notice or the first visible work if earlier. Colorado counts design work that was never visible. Georgia, North Carolina and Washington relate each lien back only to that claimant's own first work, and New York gives no relation back at all. The protection is recording before anything happens on the site, documented by a dated inspection (8).

What do the ALTA 32 and 33 endorsements actually cover?

The 33 disbursement endorsement moves the policy's date of coverage forward at each draw and raises the insured amount to the total advanced. The 32-series insures the priority of each advance through that date, including over unrecorded mechanics' liens, but only for charges designated in the draw documents or paid directly by the insurer or the insured. Work after the date of coverage and amounts not designated are outside it. The endorsements are deliberately not a payment bond (9).

How much does a commercial owner's title policy cost?

In Texas, at the promulgated table effective March 1, 2026, about $9,286 at $2 million, $38,216 at $10 million and $114,516 at $50 million, with a simultaneous loan policy at $100. Florida's promulgated schedule prices $10 million at $26,325; New York's zone-one rate is near $30,300 on a secondary transcription; California rates are filed by each insurer and we cite none. Endorsements, escrow and search fees are extra (32)(33)(34).

Which survey standard applies in 2026?

The 2026 ALTA/NSPS Minimum Standard Detail Requirements, effective February 23, 2026, for any survey contracted on or after that date. They add an optional Table A Item 20 summarizing conditions and potential encroachments and expand the reporting of easements, including those that may have terminated without a recorded release. A lender checklist that still asks for a 2021 survey is out of date (11).

Why should a buyer carry an owner's policy if the lender has one?

Because the loan policy insures the debt, follows the note, and ends at payoff. It never insured the equity. The owner's policy insures the equity for as long as the owner holds the land and continues for warranty liability after a sale, and fraud and forgery claims, the kind an owner is most exposed to, average more than five times other claims (4)(9).

Is seller impersonation a commercial risk or a residential one?

Both, and the commercial version is specific: an absentee entity owner of unencumbered vacant land whose signatory nobody at the table has met. Vacant land was the target in 82 percent of attempts reported in ALTA's 2026 study, and 59 percent of title firms saw at least one attempt in 2025. The controls are entity authority documents, signatory identity verification, independent callback of wire instructions and a closing protection letter (6)(36).

What are the six things to check before ordering a commitment?

Vesting against the seller or the eligible passive company; recorded debt against value at the program's collateral haircut; active foreclosure or litigation on the subject or a principal's other property; involuntary liens, with federal tax liens at the top; a recent or non-arm's-length transfer; and the presence of easements, declarations or leases of record. The record answers the first five and routes the sixth to the commitment and the survey (1)(16)(27).

October 26, 2026 by Michal Mohelsky, principal of MMCG Invest, LLC, a national SBA and USDA feasibility study consultancy

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Michal Mohelsky, J.D. | Principal | mmcginvest.com

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Disclaimer: This report is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment, legal, or tax advice. Data presented herein is derived from proprietary MMCG databases and third-party sources believed to be reliable; however, MMCG Invest makes no representation as to the accuracy or completeness of such information. Figures from third-party industry databases have been independently verified and, where appropriate, adjusted to reflect MMCG's proprietary analytical methodology. Statutory and regulatory references are provided for context and must be verified with counsel before reliance. MMCG Invest, LLC is not a title insurer, title agent, abstracter or law firm, and nothing in this report is a title search, abstract, report of title or opinion on the status, marketability or insurability of title to any property. Past performance is not indicative of future results.