Title Examiners, Abstractors, and Searchers
Search real estate records, examine titles, or summarize pertinent legal or insurance documents or details for a variety of purposes. May compile lists of mortgages, contracts, and other instruments pertaining to titles by searching public and private records for law firms, real estate agencies, or title insurance companies.
- US jobs
- 48,580
- Median wage
- $58,650 a year
- Job family
- Legal
Can agents do the work of title examiners, abstractors, and searchers?
We read the evidence at the level of the job family, Legal:
- Task levelUnexploredNo task-level benchmark in our collection tests legal work, such as contract review or legal research with tools.
- Project levelPartialOnly adjacent evidence. APEX-Agents includes corporate-law tasks: across banking, consulting, and law, the best agent passes 73.5% on the first try. GDPval includes lawyers among its 44 occupations. Neither benchmark tests work with real clients, courts, or deadlines.
Benchmarks for the job family
These cover work in legal, not always this occupation's tasks.
- 1846 EloClaude Opus 5.5 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort, Default Fallback) · 23 Sep 2026Unrated
Typical tasks
From O*NET 31.0. Core tasks first. Few of these tasks have a benchmark today.
- Prepare and issue title commitments and title insurance policies, based on information compiled from title searches.
- Examine documentation such as mortgages, liens, judgments, easements, plat books, maps, contracts, and agreements to verify factors such as properties' legal descriptions, ownership, or restrictions.
- Examine individual titles to determine if restrictions, such as delinquent taxes, will affect titles and limit property use.
- Prepare reports describing any title encumbrances encountered during searching activities and outlining actions needed to clear titles.
- Prepare lists of all legal instruments applying to a specific piece of land and the buildings on it.
- Copy or summarize recorded documents, such as mortgages, trust deeds, and contracts, that affect property titles.
- Verify accuracy and completeness of land-related documents accepted for registration, preparing rejection notices when documents are not acceptable.
- Read search requests to ascertain types of title evidence required and to obtain descriptions of properties and names of involved parties.
- Retrieve and examine real estate closing files for accuracy and to ensure that information included is recorded and executed according to regulations.
- Confer with realtors, lending institution personnel, buyers, sellers, contractors, surveyors, and courthouse personnel to exchange title-related information or to resolve problems.
- Obtain maps or drawings delineating properties from company title plants, county surveyors, or assessors' offices.
- Enter into record-keeping systems appropriate data needed to create new title records or to update existing ones.
Other job titles for this occupation (30)
Abstractor · Advisory Title Officer · Commercial Examiner · Commercial Title Examiner · Examiner · Title Abstractor · Title Agent · Title Examiner · Title Officer · Title Searcher · Abstract Clerk · Abstract Searcher · Abstract Writer · Commercial Title Assistant · Data Abstractor · Foreclosure Specialist · Land Examiner · Land Title Examiner · Lease Examiner · Legal Instruments Examiner · Lien Searcher · Record Searcher · Settlement Processor · Title Checker · Title Clerk · Title Closer · Title Inspector · Title Investigator · Title Processor · Title Specialist