Work the county recorder's grantor-grantee index: find the current owner on the assessor's parcel record, pull the deed that conveyed the property to them, then walk backward one grantee at a time and search each owner's name for deeds of trust, liens, judgments and easements recorded while they held it.
This is real research and it is free or close to it, and most counties now have enough of the index online to do it from a laptop. It is worth doing before an offer on an unusual property, before a trustee sale or a tax sale, and any time the ownership story sounds complicated.
It is also not a title policy, and no amount of it insures anything. That limit is the last section, and it is the most important part of the page.
What the grantor-grantee index actually is
County recorders do not file documents by property. They file them by the names on them, in two indexes: grantor, the party giving something, and grantee, the party receiving it. A deed appears in both, once under the seller and once under the buyer. So does a deed of trust.
That is why a search is a walk through names rather than a lookup by address. Many recorders, Clark County's among them, also allow a parcel number search, and that is a convenience rather than a substitute: a document indexed with a wrong or missing parcel number is still recorded and still binding, and it will only be found under the name.
The assessor is a separate office with a separate database, holding the parcel number, the owner of record, the legal description and the taxable value. Start there, because it gives you the name and the number the recorder wants.
Walking the chain backward
The chain of title is the unbroken sequence of conveyances from an early owner to the current one. You build it in reverse.
- Get the parcel number, the current owner's name and the legal description from the assessor's record.
- Search the grantee index for that owner and open the deed that conveyed the property to them. Note the recording date, the document number and the grantor's name.
- Search the grantee index for that grantor. Repeat. Each step takes you back one owner, and most residential parcels are a handful of steps to the subdivision developer.
- For each owner in the chain, search the grantor index across the years they held it. This is where the encumbrances are: deeds of trust, liens, easements, agreements recorded against the parcel.
- For every deed of trust, look for the reconveyance that released it. A payoff with no recorded reconveyance leaves the lien on the record even though the debt is gone.
- Check outside the recorder too: the treasurer for unpaid property tax, the courts for judgments and probate, and the assessor's map for the plat.
What you are looking for
Deeds first, and specifically the gaps. An owner who appears in the grantor index but never in the grantee index means a conveyance is missing from the record. A deed signed by one spouse where two are on title, a deed from an estate with no probate behind it, a dissolved corporate grantor: each is a break someone has to fix.
Then the encumbrances. Deeds of trust and whether they were reconveyed. Mechanic's liens from contractors. Association liens, which in Nevada carry a limited priority over a first security interest under NRS 116.3116. Judgment liens recorded against an owner by name, which attach to whatever they own in that county. Easements, which usually stay after the sale. And a lis pendens, the recorded notice that litigation affecting the property is pending, which is a stop sign rather than a footnote.
Reconveyance timing separates an old problem from a normal one. Under NRS 107.077 the beneficiary has 21 days after payoff to request the reconveyance and the trustee has 45 days to record it, so a paid loan with nothing recorded a year later is a real gap.
The honest limit
A self-search finds what is recorded, indexed correctly, and inside the years you looked. It cannot find a forged signature, an heir nobody recorded, a lien filed under a misspelled name, a boundary described wrongly decades ago, or a deed delivered and never recorded at all. A professional examiner misses less, and even then the point of the policy is that some things are unfindable.
The difference in one line: a search produces knowledge, and title insurance produces a payer. The owner's policy covers the loss and the legal defense on a defect the search did not catch, for as long as you own the home, and in the Las Vegas valley the seller customarily pays for it. Do the search to understand what you are buying and to spot a problem while an offer is still negotiable. Do not do it instead of buying the policy.
Questions people ask
How far back does a title search need to go?
Professional examiners commonly work a search period measured in decades rather than to the original grant, relying on title plants and prior policies for what came before. For a self-search, back to the subdivision plat or a few owners deep is usually where the useful information stops.
What is the difference between a title search and a preliminary title report?
The report is a title company's examined search, issued as a commitment to insure, listing what must be cleared before closing and what will remain as exceptions after it. A self-search produces the same kind of information with no examination and no promise behind it.