Title Watch
Many counties will watch your deed for you, for free
Few property owners know these programs exist, and the enrollment forms are hard to find. FendLand finds yours, tells you how it matches records, and keeps track of which of your properties are covered.
The county does the monitoring and sends the alert. FendLand gets you enrolled.
How a forged deed gets recorded
County recorders file documents. They are not required to confirm that a signature is genuine or that the person transferring a property is its owner, and in most places they do not. That is how a forged deed ends up recorded against a property whose owner has no idea.
It is rarer than the advertising in this category implies. When it does happen, the forged deed is what someone uses to borrow against the property or sell it to a buyer who then has their own claim to defend.
That is why counties started offering alerts. An alert does not stop a recording. It means you find out in days instead of when a bank writes to you.
What the county does, and what FendLand does
Most products in this category imply they do the monitoring themselves. FendLand does not.
Your county
- Watches the recording index for your name or parcel
- Sends you the alert email directly
- Runs the program at no cost to you
- Decides what counts as a match
FendLand
- Finds your county's program and the real enrollment link
- Tells you whether it matches on name or on parcel
- Warns you when it needs an account before the form
- Records which of your properties are enrolled
FendLand never receives your county's filings, never files anything with a recorder on your behalf, and cannot block a recording. No alert service can.
How county programs match your name
Most county programs match your name as a literal string. Register as "Robert Johnson" and a document filed against "Bob Johnson" or "Robert A. Johnson" will not trigger anything. You would be enrolled, and you would hear nothing.
Counties that key on the parcel number instead do not have that problem, and those are the better programs. FendLand tells you which kind yours is, so you know whether you need to register more than one spelling.
If you hold property in a trust or an LLC, the entity name is the one that gets filed against, and it is the one that needs registering.
Related protections against impersonation
Forging a deed, hijacking a phone number and redirecting a closing wire all start with someone collecting enough of your details to pass as you.
Background reading: can someone steal my house with a fake deed and what to do if something was already filed.
What people ask about title alerts
Does FendLand monitor my deed?
No, and this is the thing to be clear about. Your county recorder does the watching and your county sends the alert email. FendLand finds the right program for your county, tells you how it matches records and what it will ask for, and keeps track of which of your properties are enrolled. The monitoring itself is the county's, and it is free.
If the county program is free, what am I paying for?
Finding it and keeping track. There is no national registry of these programs, coverage is county by county, the enrollment pages are often buried, and roughly half of them make you create an account before you can even see the form. FendLand only lists programs it has opened and confirmed, with the real enrollment link, and records which properties you finished. If you would rather find yours yourself, you should, and it will not cost you anything.
Can an alert stop a fraudulent deed from being recorded?
No. County recorders file what they are handed and do not verify signatures, and no alert program blocks a recording. What an alert gives you is time. Deed fraud is usually recoverable if you catch it in days and becomes expensive and slow once a forged deed has been used to borrow against or sell the property.
How do these programs decide what to alert me about?
Most match on your name as written, which matters more than it sounds. A program registered as "Robert Johnson" will not fire on a document filed as "Bob Johnson". Some counties key on the parcel number instead, which is more reliable. FendLand tells you which kind yours is so you can register the name variants that matter.
Which counties are covered?
Counties are added as each program is confirmed by hand, starting with Florida. A county appears only once someone has opened its program and verified the link and the process, because a directory of unverified links pointing at dead pages is worse than no directory.
What if my county has no program?
Some do not offer one. In that case the page tells you so rather than sending you in circles, and the useful fallback is reducing how easy you are to impersonate in the first place, which is what the exposure check and Removal Center are for.
Get enrolled in your county program
Find your county's program, see how it matches, and mark the property enrolled so months from now you still know which of yours are covered.
Get FendLand