I read that thread about that title searching the manual the other day, and it was pretty controversial.  Well, I have some good news-- I think I've found a free website that will teach you everything you need to do a title search, so it's not even necessary to buy a title searching manual anymore!  Check out Go for Doing Property Title Search!

The methods in the article aren't quite the same as I remember when Robert was teaching me to do searches, but I'm sure that they get you to the same place in the end... poTAYto, poTAHto.

Property title search is a technique in which we can find the authenticity of the property and authenticity of the owner of the property. This is a safe and easy mode of buying a property. Before this technique there was no way of finding the owner’s authenticity. If you are going to buy a property then you are on the right place. I will tell you here, how to buy a property by using property title search. All you need is to have a little command on the internet. I assure you if you try this seriously, you will never get betrayed by anyone.

Hmm... I thought I heard here that sometimes you can't do a proper search on the internet, and when I was doing searches, we went to the courthouse because Robert said that most of the records weren't online. 

Maybe he just didn't know where to look on the net-- sometimes he's wrong about stuff :-)

The first step is to write the address of the property into a search engine and the search engine will provide you enormous links regarding the issues which are linked to that property.

Wait-- you can do a title search on Google?  Robert definitely never told me that! 

Maybe he just wanted me to learn the old fashioned way to do a title search... kind of like when they teach kids in school their multiplication tables, rather than just giving them calculators.

In these links you can easily find the name of the owner and the conflict cases about the property, if there are. You can also find the market value of that property from these links. In this way you can get yourself safe from any kind of a fraud case or from getting entangled into a conflict case. You can also know whether this property belongs to a single person or is disputed between the two.

You can find the market value of a property on the web on Zillow-- I do know that... I don't remember doing that for our title searches though...

The next step is to know about the owner and for this you have to contact him. Do not go for the Real Estate managers for doing this. Contact the owner by yourself and for this you have to enter into a special database site from where you can find the contact details of the owner of a property. There are available paid and non paid sites available on the internet, providing you the details about the property holders of the city. I would advice you to visit the paid sites as the content in them is purely authentic and is updated on the daily basis.

Well, that explains why we didn't do the title search this guy's way-- you have to use a paid site with this guy's searching method!  Robert was probably trying to save a little bit of cash by doing stuff at the courthouse...

A manual way of doing the property title search is to visit the county officer. A county officer has all the details about the properties been sold or purchased in the city. He can give you the contact details about the owner and can tell you about the real market value of the property. He can also tell you about how many times this property has been sold yet and about the taxes which you have to pay, when you are going to buy this property. This all will really help you to decide whether you are going to buy this property or not.

Hmm... while I was at the courthouse, someone came in and asked one of our county officers if she could tell him how many times a certain property had been sold, and she told him that that wasn't her job...