Most people who try to sell vacant land have never heard the word “title” until something goes wrong. Then they get a call from the title company saying there’s a “cloud on title” or a “broken chain” or an “unreleased lien,” and the deal grinds to a halt.
If that just happened to you, two things are worth knowing up front. First, most title issues are solvable. Second, they’re not your problem to solve. A buyer who actually knows what they’re doing handles title work as part of the deal. We’ve cleared most of the issues you’re about to read about, plus plenty of weirder ones, and we do it without dragging the seller into the legal weeds.
Here’s a plain-English guide to the issues we see most often, what they actually mean, and how we get them off the title so the sale can close.
What “Title” Actually Is
Title is just the legal record of who owns a property and what claims, if any, other people have on it. The title company pulls a “title commitment” from the county records, which lists everyone who’s ever owned the property going back decades, plus any liens, easements, judgments, or other encumbrances on file.
For a sale to close, title needs to be “clean,” meaning the seller can hand over ownership free of any claims that would carry over to the buyer. When something on the title isn’t clean, that’s a “cloud on title” and it has to be resolved before closing.
Old Mortgages That Were Never Released
This is the most common one we see, especially on land that’s been in the family for a while. Someone took out a mortgage decades ago, paid it off in full, but the lender never filed a release of the lien. So on paper, the mortgage still exists, even though the loan was paid off in 1987.
How we clear it: We work with the title company to track down the lender and get them to file a release. If the lender is out of business or has been merged into another bank, we go through corporate succession or use a lien release by affidavit. Sometimes it takes a few weeks, but the chase happens on our side.
Back Property Taxes
If property taxes haven’t been paid for several years, the county may have already started a tax sale process. Even if it hasn’t gone that far, all back taxes need to be paid at or before closing for the sale to go through.
How we clear it: We pay them out of the sale proceeds at closing. The title company collects the full amount due (taxes plus interest and penalties) and pays the county directly. You don’t write a check, you don’t come out of pocket, and the property closes with a clean tax slate.
Probate That Was Never Opened or Never Finished
This shows up constantly with inherited land. The deed is still in a deceased parent’s or grandparent’s name, but you and your siblings inherited the property when they passed. Until probate is properly handled, none of you can legally sell the property on your own.
How we clear it: We coordinate with a real estate attorney to either open a probate proceeding, finish a stalled one, or use a simpler alternative like a small estate proceeding or a determination of heirship. We’ve been doing this in Colorado, North Carolina, and South Carolina since 2019, so we know which attorneys handle these cases efficiently in each state, what the fees typically run ($1,500 to $5,000 in most situations), and how to keep things moving. In many cases we factor those costs into the deal so you don’t have to pay anything out of pocket.
If you’re in this exact situation, you don’t need to get probate sorted out before calling us. Probate is something we do.
Multiple Heirs Who All Need to Sign
Even after probate, if a property got passed down to multiple siblings or cousins, all of them generally need to sign at closing. We’ve closed deals with eight heirs spread across four states.
How we clear it: We track everyone down, get the documents to them, coordinate signatures, and send a mobile notary to wherever each person lives. None of the heirs has to travel, hire an attorney, or coordinate with each other. We do all the chasing.
Mineral Rights That Were Severed From the Surface
In a lot of states, mineral rights (oil, gas, coal) were sold off separately at some point in the property’s history. So you own the surface, but someone else (sometimes a long-defunct mining company, sometimes a trust, sometimes a neighbor’s great-grandfather) owns what’s underneath.
How we handle it: We usually don’t try to clear severed minerals because they’re not worth the legal effort to recover. What we do is factor the situation into the offer accurately and disclose it cleanly at closing. For most rural land, severed minerals don’t materially affect surface use or sale price.
Easement Disputes and No Recorded Access
Easements are legal rights for someone else to use a portion of your property (usually for a road, utility line, or drainage). The reverse can also be true: your property might rely on an easement across someone else’s land just to get to it.
The problem we see most often is land that has no recorded legal access. Maybe there’s a two-track that’s been used for fifty years, but no easement was ever filed, and now the neighboring landowner is refusing to allow it.
How we clear it: It depends on the situation. Sometimes we negotiate a recorded easement with the adjacent landowner ourselves, after closing. Sometimes an attorney pursues a prescriptive easement or easement by necessity through a quiet title action. Sometimes we buy the property with the access issue priced in and resolve it on our end. Either way, you don’t have to negotiate with the neighbor or hire an attorney.
Quiet Title Situations
Sometimes the title is so tangled that the only way to clean it up is to file a quiet title lawsuit. This is a court proceeding where the property owner asks a judge to rule that no other claims on the property are valid. You’d typically need a quiet title when there are missing heirs no one can locate, the chain of ownership has gaps no one can document, an old lien holder is out of business and can’t be made to file a release, or the property was bought at a tax sale.
How we clear it: We work with attorneys who handle quiet title cases in each state we operate in. The process typically takes 3 to 6 months and legal fees usually run $1,500 to $5,000. In a lot of cases we’ll buy the property as-is and file the quiet title ourselves after closing, so you don’t have to wait or pay anything.
Tax Sale Title
If you bought the property at a tax sale, you don’t have full marketable title until you complete the redemption period (which varies by state) and, in some states, a quiet title action. Until then, the previous owner technically has the right to redeem the property by paying back the taxes plus interest. Many title companies and many buyers won’t touch a tax-sale property.
How we clear it: Depending on the state, how much time is left in the redemption period, and the chain of title, we can sometimes structure a deal before redemption is fully complete or before quiet title is filed. It’s case by case, so it’s worth a conversation. When we can make it work, the price reflects what’s left to clear on our end, but it’s a way out that most buyers won’t offer.
Unrecorded Deeds and Chain Gaps
Once in a while, we’ll find a property where someone bought it 20 years ago but never recorded the deed, so on paper the previous owner still owns it. Or there’s a gap in the chain of ownership where one transfer was never properly documented.
How we clear it: If the missing document can be tracked down, we track it down. If the prior owner is deceased or unreachable, it usually goes through a quiet title action handled on our side.
What This Means for You
The way to read all of this is simple. Every issue above is something we’ve handled before, and almost none of it requires anything from you. We pull the title, we identify the issues, we coordinate with attorneys, we work with the title company, we pay the costs, and we close.
Your job stays the same regardless of what shows up on the title commitment. You take a phone call so we can ask about the property, you verify your ID with the title company when they reach out, you sign the closing documents with a mobile notary at your kitchen table, and you tell us how you’d like your funds delivered. That’s it.
A reasonable instinct when title issues come up is to assume the deal is dead, or to assume you need to spend thousands of dollars on attorneys before you can even talk to a buyer. Neither is true. We’ve closed plenty of deals where the seller called us specifically because another buyer or an agent told them the property couldn’t be sold without years of legal work first. It almost always can.
What to Watch For With Other Buyers
A few things to know if you’re also talking to other buyers about a property with title issues.
Some buyers use title issues as leverage to drop the price after going under contract. They’ll go in at one number, “discover” something on the title two weeks in, and demand a $10,000 reduction. The thing they “discovered” was visible on the assessor’s site the entire time. They were just hoping to lock you up first and chip the price down later.
Some buyers tell sellers their property “can’t be sold” because of a title issue, when really they just don’t know how to handle it. That doesn’t mean the property can’t be sold. It means that buyer can’t do it.
A buyer who knows what they’re doing will tell you exactly what’s on the title, what it’ll take to clear, and how that affects the offer. If you’re not getting that level of clarity, you’re probably talking to the wrong buyer.
How to Get Started
We’ve been buying land in Colorado, North Carolina, and South Carolina since 2019, including a lot of properties with title issues that scared off other buyers. Most of the time, the issues turn out to be more solvable than the seller thought. The only thing standing between you and a clean closing is one phone call.
If you’ve been trying to sell a property and ran into title problems, give us a call at (719) 224-0411 or fill out the form on our home page. Tell us what you know about the property and what the title company or anyone else has told you so far. We’ll pull the title ourselves, figure out exactly what’s going on, and come back with a no-obligation cash offer within a few days.