What is a title search? Reading the county recorder's index backwards through every document that touched a parcel, to establish who owns it and what is attached to it.
A title search is an examination of the recorded public record for one parcel, run backwards from today through every document that touched it. In Clark County that record is the recorder's index, searchable by name and by document number, and the parcel is tied into it by its legal description with the assessor's parcel number alongside. The examiner is looking for the chain of ownership and for everything attached to it: deeds, deeds of trust and whether each one has a recorded reconveyance, mechanics' liens, judgment liens, tax liens, easements, the recorded declaration and its CC&Rs, an association's lien rights, and a lis pendens, which is notice that somebody is suing over the property.
What it produces is the title commitment, and the part of it worth reading is the exceptions schedule: the list of what a policy will not cover. Beside it sits the requirements schedule, the things that have to happen before the policy issues, such as paying off and reconveying the seller's deed of trust or releasing a judgment. The commitment arrives early in escrow, and it is the buyer's one scheduled chance to read the encumbrances before closing rather than after. Stale liens are common and mostly clerical. NRS 107.077 gives the beneficiary 21 days after written notice that a debt is satisfied to ask the trustee for a reconveyance and the trustee 45 days to record it, and a loan paid off years ago with no recorded reconveyance still reads as a lien.
Then the limit that matters, which is the reason the policy exists at all. A search finds what is recorded. It cannot find a forged signature, an heir nobody disclosed, a spouse whose signature is missing from an old deed, a document indexed under a misspelled name, or a recorder's error. Those are exactly the risks a title insurance policy is written to cover, so the search reduces the risk and the insurance carries what the search cannot see. A search is also not a survey: it will tell you an easement crosses the parcel and not where the fence actually sits. In Southern Nevada the seller commonly pays for the owner's policy and the buyer for the lender's, though that is custom and negotiable rather than law.
A worked example
The commitment on a $475,000 valley home lists nine exceptions: the subdivision plat, the CC&Rs, a five-foot utility easement across the back, the association's lien rights, taxes for the current year, and the seller's $268,000 deed of trust. The deed of trust moves to the requirements schedule and is paid from the seller's proceeds at closing. A tenth item, a $6,400 judgment against someone with the seller's name, turns out to be a different person and clears on a signed statement of identity.
Title and the deed in a Nevada sale
Questions people ask
How long does a title search take?
For an ordinary residential file in a platted subdivision, commonly a few days from opening escrow to the commitment landing in the buyer's inbox. It runs longer when the chain has a probate, a trust, a divorce, a prior foreclosure or a name indexed several ways in it, and those are the files where reading the commitment the day it arrives matters most.
Can you do a title search yourself?
You can read the county recorder's index yourself. It is public, and walking the chain of deeds and deeds of trust on a parcel is a reasonable afternoon's work. What you cannot do yourself is issue a title commitment or a policy, and a self-run search carries no insurance behind it, which is the part that pays when something unrecorded surfaces.