Closing Attorney & Title Services in Green Hills, TN

Buying in Green Hills or selling there, the contract in front of you is the standard Tennessee form, and it has nothing to say about which government the house answers to, how many homes the lot may hold, or what the nearest creek did last spring. Most of what sells here is one of three things: an older brick house on a big lot, a newer house that replaced one, or one of two homes standing where a single house used to be. Each puts different papers on the table, and the inexpensive time to read them is before your signature, not after it. Buying your first home? The road from offer to keys →

Begin with a question no purchase contract asks: who makes the rules for this house? Green Hills itself is not a city. It is part of Metro Nashville, roughly I-440 to Harding Place and Estes Road to Lealand Lane, and the plans to incorporate it in the late 1950s and early 1960s never went through. Two neighbours did incorporate - Oak Hill in 1952 and Forest Hills in 1957 - and each writes its own zoning and issues its own building permits, while both keep Nashville mailing addresses. Forest Hills City Hall sits on Hillsboro Pike in 37215, the same ZIP code Green Hills uses, so the address line settles nothing. If you mean to add on, rebuild or divide the lot, look up the parcel and confirm whose code applies before you sign. Selling? Know the answer before the first buyer asks it. ^‡‡‡‡

Next, find out how many homes the lot is allowed to carry. In Metro's zoning, an RS district is for single-family houses only, while an R district with the same minimum lot sizes allows single- and two-family homes. That one letter is why an older ranch can stand beside a pair of tall new houses on the same street. Many of those pairs are sold as a horizontal property regime, which is a form of condominium: you own your unit, you share the common elements - under Tennessee law those can include the land, the foundations and the roof - and a master deed and bylaws recorded with the Register decide who maintains what and let the association levy assessments. A regime created before January 1, 2009 falls under the Horizontal Property Act; most created since then fall under the Tennessee Condominium Act of 2008. Buying one half of a pair? Read the master deed and bylaws before you sign, learn what the owner next door is responsible for, and ask whether any assessment is unpaid. Selling one half? Have those documents ready, because a careful buyer will want them. ^‡‡‡‡

Buying a house that is still going up, or an old one you plan to take down? Metro Water Services calls it infill when a house is torn down and one or two homes are built back, and an addition that adds more than 800 square feet of new hard surface counts too. Infill goes through a stormwater review, and the building permit is not finished until an infill reviewer signs off on the final grading after construction. On a new build, ask for proof that the grading sign-off and the use and occupancy approval are done before you schedule the closing. On a rebuild of your own, give the calendar room: Metro's guide warns that its review offices are handling an unprecedented number of permit applications. ^‡‡

Then look at the water. On April 3, 2025, Sugartree Creek rose into the Westchase neighbourhood and carried a parked car under the bridge at the Green Hills YMCA entrance. Sugartree is part of the Richland Creek watershed, and in the 2010 flood Richland Creek had its worst flooding since 1926. Nashville's flood maps were redrawn in 2024 and put more than 400 homes in new flood zones, so an old survey, or a neighbour's memory, is not an answer. Look the exact address up on FEMA's Flood Map Service Center and get an insurance quote before you write the offer, while the number can still shape the price. Selling near a creek? Expect to be asked what the water has done, and answer straight. ^{‡‡‡‡‡}

The last stop is downtown. Your deed is recorded with the Davidson County Register of Deeds, which moved in 2024 from Bridgestone Arena to 300 Deaderick Street, near the Metro Courthouse. What is particular here is the tax calendar. The Metro Trustee mails bills to the owner of record in the first week of October, they can be paid through the last day of February, and from March 1 interest runs at 1.5 percent a month. The Trustee is plain that unpaid taxes keep accruing against the property, not against whoever owed them. On any closing between October and March, find out whose name is on this year's bill, and whether it has been paid, before the settlement figures are final. ^‡‡ Who pays which closing costs in Tennessee → What title insurance covers, and what it does not →