What is title insurance, and do I need it on bare land?
Title insurance protects against defects in ownership — unknown heirs, unreleased liens, misdescribed boundaries. Yes, you need it on land; a lender's policy is required on every loan, and land titles are frequently messier than house titles, not cleaner.
Rural parcels carry title risk that subdivisions do not: land held in one family for generations with informal inheritance along the way, decades-old mineral and easement reservations, fence lines that wandered off the legal description, and old ag liens nobody released. The title search surfaces these before closing; the policy insures against what the search could not find.
Two policies exist. The lender's policy — required, premium paid by the borrower at closing — protects the loan. An owner's policy protects your equity and is optional but cheap when purchased simultaneously, since you pay only a simultaneous-issue rate on top of the lender's premium. On a purchase, buying the owner's policy is nearly always worth it.
When the search finds a problem, that is the system working. Most findings — an unreleased mortgage from 1998, a missing heir signature — are curable in days with a recorded release or affidavit. The ones that are not curable are deals you wanted to walk away from anyway.
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