Title insurance, HOA policy...omg lol

[Aram Schwartz]

As we are progressing with the studio condo bought on auction.com, we are also progressing on making an offer for a multi-family with 3 units. The cadence... it's a bit tense. I have a few questions.

1) The title insurance is important. From auction.com, so far it seems the title goes through the seller's escrow, I have had mixed information from auction.comrepresentatives. Initially an auction.com contract mentioned there being a preliminary title insurance in the contract (fyi, I still have a couple of days to sign the initial contract because of the labor day weekend delay), but I don't think there is a preliminary title insurance in the contract. No problem. I reached out to auction.com again a different representative said I will never receive a preliminary title insurance in the contract so it was misinformation from earlier. She also said that the title insurance will go through the seller's escrow, but that one does not include HOA liens and mechanics liens (or IRS liens). I've contacted a title company myself and will be getting the quote for a prelim and a full title report. There is a lot of info here I am not sure who is correct. a) does the full title report really not include HOA liens and mechanics liens??? b) are the title reports ordered by different title companies different??? c) I contacted the listing agent and we have a great relationship he told me there are no HOA liens because he's been paying and he gave me a direct contact to the HOA company d) for the IRS liens my partner found propertyshark that gave us a report of our building, and we found the previous owner prior to the bank who sold it to us, we looked her up on publicly available IRS liens website and couldn't find anything. Too long drawn out sorry haha! I guess it's something about title insurance and exactly what this title policy will cover...my loan agent for the multi-family said that it is best I do title insurance myself with my own title company...curious your experience

2) With the condo from auction, I just assumed that once I own it I can rent it out. An agent friend says it all depends on your particular HOA's policy. I will get a confirmation about this later today.

3) Also, do you know anything about this primary residence designation. We are in the process of moving forward with the condo from auction.com and another multifamily; if the multifamily goes through we'll most likely make that our primary residence, is this primary residence information something that can easily be changed later for the 2 years residing capital gains tax purposes. I know the mail has to correspond to that residence, you would have to live there. Originally we though we'd live in the condo 2 years and then the multifamily 2 years, but it'd be nice if the primary residence designation is easily changeable....if the multifamily does not close, then we would have the condo as our primary residence. not sure if that important of an issue...

4) The contract that has disclosures about lead and radon...we live in New Jersey, so for renting we sign disclosures about lead, since all the houses here are old and anything prior to 70's will have lead, so in the contract when they have radon....lead....naturally occurring substances in New Jersey, is this standard in the contract?

No response needed, just curious from your experience. I think I'll probably get the answers to most of these by the end of the day.

Thanks so much & Regards,

[Tom Gimer]

@Peter Walther Many tax sales in the mid-Atlantic region are lien sales... the high bidder ends up with a tax sale certificate representing a lien that must be foreclosed if a deed to the property is the ultimate goal.