Title Companies Editing and Proofreading Services

A title report runs to fourteen pages and lists eleven exceptions. The buyer reads the word "insured" at the top and files it. Somewhere in those exceptions is a right of way across the side passage, a covenant restricting the use of the garage, and a mineral reservation from 1911 — and one of them is going to matter, probably when they apply to build an extension.

We edit what title insurers, agents and conveyancers produce — title reports and commitment documents, exception schedules and their explanations, requirement and clearance documentation, endorsement and coverage explanations, closing and settlement statement content, buyer and lender-facing summaries of title issues, defect and claim correspondence, search result explanations, indemnity and policy documentation, and consumer-facing material explaining what title insurance does. Our editors work on the exception schedule the buyer will need in five years.

The exceptions schedule is where a title report either informs a buyer or discharges a duty, and its failure is reproducing the historic wording without translating it. An exception quoting a 1911 conveyance in the language of 1911 has been disclosed and not communicated. We work through these so each exception carries a plain-language sentence saying what it actually means for this buyer and this property, since a covenant is only interesting for what it stops somebody doing; so the exceptions that could affect a normal owner's plans are separated from the ones that are almost certainly academic, because a schedule where a right of way and a Victorian mineral reservation appear identically ranked teaches the reader to skim both; so anything that would affect an extension, a conversion, a boundary change or a sale is flagged as such, given that these are the four things buyers do; so the practical route to deal with each is named — the consent required and from whom, the indemnity available, the deed of variation, or the fact that nothing can be done; so the difference between what is insured and what is merely disclosed is stated plainly, as this is the distinction buyers most often get wrong; so the exceptions that will need to be disclosed again on a future sale are identified; and so the summary lists the two or three that matter. Reports written this way get read when they are needed rather than filed when they arrive.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including title documents, searches and client information. We are editors rather than conveyancers, title examiners or insurers, and we offer no view on title, coverage or the effect of any exception. What we can do is translate the schedule into what it means for the person buying.