The house shows beautifully. New kitchen, quiet street, fresh paint, good light. And almost none of what actually costs you later shows up on a Saturday walkthrough — because it doesn’t live in the house, it lives in the public record. A debt riding on the title. A code case quietly stacking up fines. An addition nobody ever pulled a permit for. For $59 and a few minutes, you can read every bit of it before you’re emotionally attached and financially committed.
Debts that come with the house
Some debts are tied to the property itself, not to the person who ran them up — so when you buy the house, you can buy the bill right along with it. Old liens, unpaid county fines, back taxes. We pull what’s recorded against the place, and we flag anything that looks settled but was never actually cleared on paper, so you’re not the one who discovers it the month after closing.
Close on the wrong house and your first month as an owner can go straight to paying off a complete stranger’s old debt.
Fines that grow every single day
When a property is out of code — an illegal addition, an unsafe structure, a yard gone full jungle — the city can fine it every single day until it’s fixed. And here’s the part that gets people: those fines don’t reset when the house sells. They land on the next owner. A small thing nobody dealt with a few years back can be a five-figure number by the time you’re at the closing table. We show you the open cases and exactly what they’re sitting at.
Work done over a weekend, off the books
The renovated kitchen, the converted garage, the newer roof — were they permitted and inspected, or done over a weekend with a buddy and no paperwork? It matters more than it sounds. Unpermitted work can sink an insurance claim at the exact moment you need it, tank your own resale down the road, or have to be torn out and rebuilt to code on your dime. We pull the permit history so you can tell what was done by the book from what wasn’t — while it’s still the seller’s problem, not yours.
Check it before you spend on the inspection
This is the cheap step that’s supposed to come first. Before you put down a few hundred dollars on a formal inspection and an appraisal — let alone earnest money you can actually lose — spend $59 to find out whether the property is even worth chasing. If it’s clean, you go forward knowing. If it’s not, you just saved yourself the slow, expensive way of finding out — and you move on to the next one with your money still in your pocket.
Make sure the seller can actually sell it
It sounds almost too basic to check — but it’s exactly where deals quietly fall apart. An estate that was never properly sorted out, an ex still sitting on the deed, a company that doesn’t quite match who’s signing the paperwork. Any of it can mean the person selling doesn’t actually have a clean right to hand it over. We check who really owns it, and whether the chain of ownership holds together, before your money is anywhere near the line.
Think of it as a credit check for the house
You’d never take out a car loan without someone running your credit first. This is that exact move, for the single biggest purchase of your life: a fast, $59 look at the property’s record before you commit a cent. It’s not a full certified title search — it’s the honest first look that tells you whether to keep going, push back on the price, or walk away clean. And if it comes back spotless? Now you actually know, instead of just hoping.