Parcel Assemblage Title Research, 7 Attorney Checks

Assembling a development site out of six or ten adjoining parcels is not six or ten title searches. It is that, plus a set of questions that only exist because the parcels are being combined, and those questions are where assemblages fail. The risk is not in any single chain. It is in the ground between the chains, and nobody owns the gaps until somebody needs to build across them.

An assemblage also has a peculiar commercial problem. The last parcel is worth more than the first, so diligence order and option structure matter as much as the searching does.

What makes an assemblage different

Four things, and none of them appear on a single parcel search.

• Gaps and gores. Adjoining descriptions written at different times by different surveyors frequently fail to meet. A two foot strip between two lots may belong to a third party nobody has identified, or to a predecessor who died in 1931.
• Overlaps. The reverse problem. Two chains describe the same ground, and buying both does not resolve which one was good.
• Vacated streets and alleys. Where a municipality vacated a right of way, title typically reverts to the abutting owners, often to the centerline, and the conveyance is frequently never recorded as a deed at all.
• Inconsistent descriptions. One parcel by metes and bounds, one by lot and block, one by reference to a plat superseded in 1968. Reconciling them is a legal description exercise before it is anything else.

What the record gives you and what it does not

It gives you each chain, the encumbrances on each parcel, and every recorded description. That is the raw material and it is not the answer, because the answer is a single composite boundary and no instrument describes one.

It does not give you the ground. Only a survey, and specifically an ALTA survey covering all parcels as one, shows where the descriptions actually fall and where they fail to meet. Ordering the searches without the survey produces a file that looks complete and answers a different question.

Seven checks on an assemblage

1. Search every parcel to the same depth

An assemblage is only as clean as its worst chain. A shallow search on the cheapest lot is where the defect will be, and it is the parcel nobody spent money on.

2. Map the descriptions against each other before ordering the survey

Reading the descriptions side by side surfaces most gaps and overlaps on paper, which tells the surveyor where to look and shortens the work considerably.

3. Run the vacated right of way separately

Find the vacation ordinance, establish when it took effect, and work out who the abutting owners were on that date. Title to a vacated street is frequently held by somebody who has no idea they hold it.

4. Identify every remnant strip and its owner

Railroad spurs, drainage ditches, old alley stubs and surveyor’s slivers. Each needs an owner identified and a plan, and a quiet title action is the usual route where the owner cannot be found.

5. Reconcile easements across the whole site

An easement burdening one parcel for the benefit of another inside the assemblage may merge when both come into one ownership, or may not. Easements benefiting parcels outside it certainly do not, and a utility easement crossing the middle of the site can dictate the entire building footprint.

6. Check what is under and over the site

Severed mineral interests beneath, as in severed mineral interests title research, and air rights or overhang easements above. Both are easy to skip on a site being valued for what will stand on it.

7. Sequence the options and the recording

Options and purchase agreements should be recorded or memorialized in an order that does not advertise the assemblage before it is complete, since a holdout parcel is the classic failure and the record is public.

What to state in the report

A search reports what was recorded and indexed over the term searched, parcel by parcel. It does not establish a composite boundary, resolve a gap, or determine who owns a vacated street, all of which are legal and survey questions. On an assemblage the most useful thing a report can do is name precisely which parcels the searched descriptions fail to close against, and leave the resolution to counsel and the surveyor. Where a remnant traces back to a break in one of the chains, wild deeds and breaks in the chain describes how those arise.

That discipline is the same one that governs any commercial acquisition, applied across several chains at once.

Ordering the search

AFX Research runs in-person searches, certified abstracts, and full document copies from any U.S. county — delivered in 12 to 72 hours and backed by our search guarantee. On an assemblage that means a full chain per parcel, the vacation ordinances and plats, and every description attached in full rather than summarized.

Order a title search listing every parcel identifier, or compare our search products if the site runs to more than a handful of lots.