What Is a Title Commitment? How to Read One Before Closing

A title commitment is the title company’s written promise to issue a title insurance policy on the home you’re buying — if a listed set of requirements gets satisfied — along with its findings about the property: who legally owns it, what liens are recorded against it, and which exceptions the policy won’t cover. It lands early in escrow, almost nobody reads it, and it’s one of the few documents in the stack that can tell you, in advance, exactly what could cloud your ownership.

Think of it as the X-ray that comes before the title insurance policy: the commitment shows what the title company found; the policy insures around it.

Why it exists

You can’t see ownership problems by touring a house. A forged deed in 1994, an unpaid contractor’s lien, an easement giving the neighbor a driveway across your yard — all invisible at the open house, all recorded (or lurking) in the public record. Before a title company insures your ownership, it searches that record and publishes the results as the commitment. The document protects everyone’s sequencing: the buyer learns what they’re actually buying, the lender confirms its deed of trust will sit in first position, and escrow gets its checklist of what to pay off and record at closing.

The anatomy: Schedules A, B-1, and B-2

Title commitments follow a standard skeleton. Three parts matter:

Schedule A — the facts. Who currently holds title, the legal description of the property, the proposed insured (you) and policy amounts. Boring, but verify it: a wrong middle initial or wrong legal description caught now is a typo; caught at closing, it’s a delay.

Schedule B-1 — requirements. What must happen before the policy issues: pay off the seller’s existing loans, release recorded liens, record the new deed. This is escrow’s to-do list. In Washington, that work runs through the escrow closing process, with Limited Practice Officers preparing the documents — see our explainer on what escrow does and charges.

Schedule B-2 — exceptions. The list that deserves your actual attention: everything the policy will not insure against. Standard utility easements, recorded plat conditions, and CC&Rs are normal furniture. What you’re hunting for is the unusual:

• Easements that cross where you’d want a garage, addition, or DADU
• CC&Rs or recorded agreements restricting use (view covenants, shared driveways, private road maintenance)
• Liens that shouldn’t exist — an old deed of trust never reconveyed, a tax lien, a contractor’s lien from the seller’s remodel
• Anything suggesting an ownership dispute, boundary issue, or pending matter

What can go wrong

The failure mode isn’t usually the title company missing something — it’s the buyer never reading Schedule B-2 and discovering the easement after drawing up addition plans. Other classics: a payoff that surfaces late (the seller’s forgotten HELOC), an estate sale where a required signature is missing, or a boundary/encroachment question that turns out to matter exactly as much as the survey you didn’t order. Most title wrinkles are curable; the cost is time, and in a deal with a rate lock running, time is money.

What to actually do with yours

1. Read Schedule B-2 the week it arrives, not the week of closing. Your purchase contract gives you a window to object to title matters; it’s only useful if you look while it’s open.
2. Ask the title officer to explain anything opaque. Pulling the underlying recorded documents on an exception is routine — request them.
3. Map the easements against any future plans (shop, ADU, fence). Paper rights beat assumptions.
4. Buy the owner’s policy. In Washington it’s customarily seller-paid, but confirm — and understand what it does and doesn’t cover before you waive anything.
5. Genuinely weird exception? That’s a real-estate-attorney consult, cheap relative to the problem.

Reading one dense document carefully is the theme of buying well — and so is knowing what every professional in your deal charges. Manaky Homes puts Greater Seattle agents’ fees in the open, side by side and free to compare. Waitlist here.