CU Title Insurance Agency, LLC Excalibur Rd, Bowie

CU Title provided excellent service to my fianceé and I. We’re first time home buyers and they walked us through the entire process to make sure everything made sense. Highly recommend them! Very professional, responsive, and honest! Thanks for making the house buying process a bit easier!

This will be a long post, but I think it’s important to tell my story—it could be yours too. I had a condo in Laurel, became sick and disabled in 1998, and with just 1/3 my salary in retirement, accrued credit card debt and subsequent judgment and lien (sometime around 2002) before getting SS disability that same year. I tried to resolve the debt but they were cruel and bullies, and I was too sick to deal with them. In the fall of 2015, I moved to the Midwest to reduce expenses, renting my condo until I felt I could sell. Three months ago I hired CU Title Insurance to do a check to see if the lien had expired, and to my delight it had. Here’s what no one will tell you if you’re in my situation: there’s a 12-year limit on liens in Maryland; it cannot be refiled, making the clock start over. (A judgment in the courts can be amended but it does not and cannot affect the lien.). Your debt does not go away after the lien expires, but the bank can’t go after your home to get it. Unfortunately, I did not understand this until Shelly at CU Title explained it to me yesterday. In early November of this year—after getting that “clean” check by CU Title, I listed and sold my condo in just a week. The buyer chose a different title company and apparently some or all of their staff are less knowledgeable about such things, so they looked into the judgment (not the search for a lien) and ended up contacting the cc company/bank. Of course, the bank’s lawyers weren’t going to tell her there was no lien; if I’d only gone by what they told me, I would have gotten virtually nothing back from the closing—money I desperately need now. But as I mentioned, I immediately reconnected with the president at CU Title after learning about this horrible turn of events (I was furious), but she told me she’d bet her 30 years of experience that the other company was wrong. She double-checked with her underwriters, then she called the other company’s rep handling my sale and explained how she was misinformed; that rep talked with their underwriters and was told the same thing. The result is that I’ll get my money as expected, but not without a day of unnecessary anxiety and letter writing. The lesson here for SELLERS like me is to pay the fee for a title check before you put your place on the market; it’s worth the money. And if you’re BUYING, it’s just as important to be sure you have a knowledgeable representative within a company as well as a company with a long, respected reputation. It’s the biggest purchase you’ll likely make in your lifetime. *** I wish I could give CU Title Insurance 10 stars. ***

Great experience on the closing of my mortgage loan!