Modernizing Title Search Practices By Legislation

INTRODUCTION: Recently the Pennsylvania Bar Association has encouraged its committees on Real Property matters to consider a variety of legislative devices to enable lawyers to search real estate titles more efficiently. The problem of efficiency in title searches is not new nor is it peculiar to Pennsylvania. Perhaps it is true that the states in the union with a colonial past have longer chains of titles to search, but the present volume of conveyancing transactions burdens the record of deeds offices in almost all large urban areas. Land title record offices there are being buried under a deluge of paper. Inefficient searches have of course a further impact on conveyancing costs. These costs have recently been studied by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Pennsylvania Bar Association responded; varying the definitions underlying the HUD study, it produced its own estimates of conveyancing costs in selected counties in the Commonwealth.