From time-to-time, liens pop up on titles when we're doing the title search. Various types of liens, and we're seeing more and more as we come out of the foreclosure crisis as people kind of went through tough choppy times.
Right. Walk through some of those I guess more commonly that we see in how we deal with them.
The most common are going to be government leads for state and federal income taxes and then personal judgment liens someone who has taken somebody to court, gotten a judgment lean and file it against the property either way. A lien holder is only entitled to the equity in the property. So if I'm selling the house and there's a million dollar IRS lean, you don't have to pay the million dollars to the IRS. You just have to pay the proceeds. They might take it all but the idea is the proceeds were 30 grand. You're likely going to be 30 grand after the after the mortgage holder gets paid from the seller.
Yeah. So once we identify that there's a lean it's more of a timing issue. I've got to get a payoff from the government, the IRS, the state and that can take time. We all know how fast the government tends to move. It's more challenging when we're starting to talk about judgment leads.
Right? This is an individual. Like I said that is taking somebody to court one and is expecting money and they're going to be very unlikely to or at least not very cooperative to give you a release of that lien if they're not getting all their money back. Sometimes they don't get any money back and then it's even more challenging to get that release.
Yeah, the other thing that comes up are prior owner liens, right?
Yeah, that may or may not have been paid. Let's say they were paid but no one follows up with a discharge that we have to deal with.
Right or maybe it wasn't paid in full. What do we do now?
Right, anytime we're paying off a lien. We always exchange the check for the release.
Yes.
