Title Insurance vs Home Title Lock

What’s the difference between title insurance and Home Title Lock? Simply put, Home Title Lock offers a subscription monitoring service for $14.99 per month that will alert you to court filings that affect your home’s title, where title insurance is a product that protects you from the possibility that someone may come along and contest your ownership of a property.

Title insurance can help protect you from losses if there is a problem with undisclosed heirs to the property, unpaid taxes, pending legal action, errors, or other problems with the deed that are a matter of public record. In these events if a problem occurs, the policy will pay for financial losses.

Home Title Lock is different because it’s a monitoring service that promises to alert you to anything affecting your home’s title, which could include mortgage/deed fraud. Once you receive a notice from Home Title Lock, and it has been determined that a fraudulent change in ownership has occurred, the company will file an affidavit on your behalf with the county. That alerts the county to a deed problem and also lets Realtors and title companies know there’s something wrong with the deed/title that needs to be cleared up before the property can be sold.

However, if you do end up having to file a claim to get your property back, according to the rep I spoke with, there is no legal obligation for Home Title Lock to step in and pay you for financial losses. So, to recap, if you want to have your property monitored by Home Title Lock, it will notify you of any changes to your deed, but it is under no obligation to pay for any losses sustained in the event you suffer financial losses. Title insurance covers defects in a title to your property from things that have happened in the past or things that were a matter of public record, not for things that may happen in the future.

Another option is to self-monitor your property for free by periodically checking your property deed on record on the county’s website. In addition, make sure you receive your property tax statements every year, which is a good indication that you are listed as the owner of the property. I spoke with a representative in the assessor’s office and she said they need the owner’s name, address and legal description of the property with a notarized signature before a change in ownership can be filed.

Then I spoke with a couple of local title agents and a local Realtor who informed me that this type of fraud is not prevalent in North Idaho. Also, from researching this topic it seems that scammers target vacant properties and obituaries. Scammers then scour property ownership records to see if they can “catch” owners/heirs not paying attention to their property or unaware of a family death, giving them enough time to perpetrate the crime hoping they won’t get caught.