Best title company in Watertown, Tennessee?

The truth about a title company

Every title company in Tennessee issues the same policy at the same rate filed with the state. The settlement fee runs about the same from office to office, usually $500 to $900. What varies is care and speed, and some of the offices in and around Watertown are very good at both. But none of them can tell you what your contract means, what to do when the seller skips the repair or the earnest money is in dispute, or whether to sign. The law forbids it.

What the Tennessee legislature said about it

The Paradox: Tennessee law protects your right to choose who closes your real estate deal. Tennessee law also says a title company cannot practice law or give legal advice.

The Result: use that right to choose a title company, and you have put the biggest and most important legal and financial transaction most people will ever have in their lives in the hands of an office that is forbidden from advising you or protecting your interests.

This is the confusing part for the consumer. There is an attorney in most of these offices. You see a lawyer at the closing table and think, I have legal representation. You don't. The reason you don't is that the Tennessee legislature said you can't: a company cannot practice law, and the lawyer who works for a company represents the company. "Attorney-owned," "attorney-led" and "attorney-supervised" describe the business, not you.

How Vanderpool Law is different

The question to ask is who at this table is allowed to be on my side. At a title company, no one. At Vanderpool Law and Title Services, we can, and we frequently do. We have helped more than 15,000 people all over Tennessee navigate the tricky legal and financial situations that arise in everyday residential and commercial real estate transactions. There is very little we haven't seen. We do the title work, we close for the same fee a title company charges, and we represent you. Watertown is about an hour and ten minutes east of our Franklin office, around I-840 to I-40 and out Highway 70, and we have closed there many times.

We have done this before, for buyers and for sellers. We know that convenience is a primary consideration when the closing office is not around the corner, so we make it convenient. We have mobile notaries who come to your kitchen table. In most cases, depending on your particular situation and, if you are buying, your lender, you can close with a remote online notary, which works like a Zoom call except that you are signing. And in special cases we come to you ourselves. Distance is a logistics problem, not a representation problem.

At a title company there is a reason you never get an engagement letter: you are not represented. At Vanderpool Law you are, and it says so in writing. Sending us a contract does not make you our client; an engagement letter does. The reason is simple. You have a lawyer on your side, not one who works for a title company.

Closing in Watertown

A Watertown, TN 37184 address reaches across about 110 square miles and into Smith County, while the city itself is 1.4 of those square miles, with a sewer system from 1962 and a historic overlay on its square - so the house under your contract may answer to the county for its zoning and its septic permit, or to City Hall for its water bill and its storefront, and which one is worth knowing before you sign.

Say the house is out past the end of the sidewalks on a road that still carries a Watertown name, or it is one of the brick buildings on the square with an apartment upstairs. The contract in front of you is the same statewide form either way, and it has no line for the questions that decide what you are buying here: whether the parcel is inside the city or only near it, where the wastewater goes, and whether the front of the building belongs to a historic overlay as much as to you. Every one of those answers sits in a public record, in the courthouse in Lebanon or at City Hall on Sparta Pike, and each is cheaper to learn while the inspection period is still open.

A Watertown question can mean three offices in Lebanon and one on Sparta Pike: the Register and the Planning Office in the courthouse, the Zoning Division in the annex on East Gay Street, and City Hall for the water and sewer account. Ask Vanderpool Law and one call covers all four.

Send us the address with the contract and ask, and before you sign you know whether the parcel is in the city, in the county or across the line in Smith County, whether it drains to the city's sewer or a septic system, and whether the building's front belongs to the historic overlay.

On land, Vanderpool Law reads the plat, the greenbelt status and the rollback clause beside the contract while the inspection period still leaves you room to negotiate, and puts who pays a rollback in writing.

The Public Square. The brick square rebuilt after the 1903 fire, listed on the National Register as the Watertown Commercial Historic District and covered by the city's overlay. A building here comes with a Certificate of Appropriateness for any exterior work; price the renovation after you read the 2018 guidelines, not before.

County: Wilson County (county seat: Lebanon) - but the 37184 ZIP code also takes in a corner of Smith County. Where your deed records: Wilson County Register of Deeds, Wilson County Courthouse, 228 East Main Street, Room 108, Lebanon, TN 37087; weekdays 8:00 to 4:00.

The full local guide, with its sources, is our Watertown page.

How we can help you

Before you sign or after, every buyer and every seller gets four complimentary services: contract review, a preliminary title search, a preliminary settlement statement, and a savings check. All you have to do is ask. Send us the contract and see your settlement statement in about five minutes; then talk it over with Jim Vanderpool, who answers your questions as your lawyer, complimentary. When you decide to hire us, the engagement letter says what we do for you and what it costs, which is the fee a title company charges.

The questions behind the search