In response to above:  I wasn't talking about the vesting.  Obviously we are supposed to report who owns 100% of the fee simple interest in the property.  There are so many iterations of different types of searches out there!  A property report to one company is a current owner search to another.  You would think that a company that has gone to the trouble of writing such detailed instructions would make them complete.  In terms of their statement in their instructions, there is a difference between what seems logical to me and what is ambiguous on paper.  These days you just never know what a client is using your search information for.  Is it for title insurance, is it for property report (whatever that is to them) is it for some other purpose?  Even if I do a current owner search, there are some folks that would say they want easements, restrictions etc with that search and then there are some that wouldn't want it.  If I was doing a current owner search for a property report, my client wouldn't care about easements and restrictions, but if I was doing one for title insurance, they might.  There is no good way to know what is expected of you in some of these situations.  I'm not sure if the instructions in writing are a good thing or a bad thing at this point.  Apparently even when they are in writing there can still be lots of ambiguity. 

I think part of the problem is that today's abstractor is so far removed from the rest of the industry and process.  There are plenty of abstractors that don't really understand the difference between insured products and non-insured products, between a comittment and a policy.  I think the lack of clear national standards and communication between the agent/underwriter community and the abstracting community is sort hidden under the surface.  The industry things it is running just fine, but there really are quite a lot of disasters waiting to happen.

Clients don't really want to be questioned on what they want or why they want it, yet if we don't question them we may find out down the road that we really didn't give them what they wanted.