Nearly every step in a real estate closing has gone digital over the past decade. From buyers signing disclosures on a tablet, to notaries working remotely, to lenders running automated underwriting models that clear a loan file in minutes. We’ve certainly come a long way in automating the process.
And yet, search and exam, the process that determines whether a property can transfer clean title, has mostly stayed where it was 20 years ago: An examiner working through county records by hand, or a team overseas doing the same thing at a lower hourly rate.
While some parts of the search and exam process are now digital, it’s almost impossible to find a search and exam workflow that doesn’t have a human in the middle. That’s an odd place for the industry to still be stuck, especially when one considers how central this process is to everything that follows.
The reason it’s still manual
Ask an agency owner why search and exam hasn’t automated the way the rest of the file has, and the answer almost always comes back to trust. I have had that conversation more times than I can count, and I don’t argue with it. An underwriter has to stand behind that commitment letter. A missed lien or an unresolved judgment carries financial and legal consequences that a mis-signed disclosure doesn’t.
So the instinct is to keep a person, or several people, doing the work directly, on the theory that a human reading every document is safer than software doing it. We have learned, however, that the instinct is right about the risk, but wrong about where the risk is. It is built on a misunderstanding of what the technology is actually being asked to do.
Two different kinds of work
Search and exam involves two distinct activities that tend to get treated as one.
The first is the mechanical task of locating documents in a county record system, reading them, keying names and dates and then assembling a chain of title. None of that requires much judgment. It does, however, require patience and accuracy. But isn’t that exactly the kind of task software handles well? People, however careful, eventually get tired doing things manually, which can easily lead to decreased focus and increased error rates.
The second activity is the actual examination, deciding whether a defect is curable and what exceptions belong in the commitment letter. This, of course, depends on someone qualified to make the call, and no technology should be making it alone.
Agencies that treat search and exam as one undifferentiated block of manual labor tend to either automate none of it, out of caution, or try to automate all of it, which is its own mistake.
What changes when the mechanical work is given to technology
Once the mechanical tasks are redistributed to the technology, the examiner isn’t reviewing raw county records anymore. Instead, they’re reviewing an organized, already-assembled file and applying judgment to specific questions. That’s clearly a faster, more consistent version of the same job.
Offshoring the manual work doesn’t solve this problem. It simply moves the same slow, document-by-document process to a lower-cost location. The file still arrives at the examiner’s desk in the same raw shape as before.
The bottleneck, described all too often as labor cost, should really be defined by how much of the file a person has to touch before judgment or nuance becomes involved.
The closing timeline argument
Closing timelines have actually improved industry-wide. ICE Mortgage Technology’s most recent data puts the national average for a purchase loan under 40 days as of early 2026, the fastest pace the company has recorded since it began tracking the metric. But that average hides a lot of variation.
Search and exam is still one of the more common places a file stalls, particularly on older or rural county records that don’t have clean digital indexes, and particularly when an agency is running that process by hand or through an offshore team working through a queue of files one at a time.
Admittedly, a faster search and exam doesn’t always guarantee a faster closing. Financing and appraisal steps, among others, run on their own timelines. But it removes one of the few delays an agency can control directly, rather than one it has to wait on a lender or an appraiser to resolve.
None of this mandates that we take the judgment away from the people trained to exercise it. The agencies with the optimal search and exam process in place aren’t removing examiners from the process. Rather, they’re giving them a cleaner file to start from, so the hours they spend go toward decisions that require a person, like whether a defect needs to be cured.
Search and exam can become one of the more automated parts of the file without losing the person whose signature is the reason a title company exists in the first place.
Wade Thibodeaux is the Co-Founder & CEO of Talos Title.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of HousingWire’s editorial department and its owners. To contact the editor responsible for this piece: [emailprotected].
