Clark County Title Search and What the Las Vegas Record Shows

A Clark County title search is a search of three different offices, and knowing which one holds what is most of the work. The county contains Las Vegas, Henderson, North Las Vegas and Boulder City, it is overwhelmingly a county of planned communities and associations, and both of those facts shape what a search finds.

Nevada also does something that surprises buyers arriving from other states, securing nearly all residential lending with a deed of trust rather than a mortgage. The instrument you are looking for is usually not called a mortgage at all.

Where Clark County keeps the records

• The Clark County Recorder holds the recorded instruments, meaning deeds, deeds of trust, reconveyances, assignments, easements, liens, and the notices that drive a non-judicial foreclosure.
• The Clark County Assessor holds parcel numbers, legal descriptions and the owner of record as shown on the assessment roll. This is the usual entry point when all you have is a street address.
• The courts are where judgments originate, in the District Court or a Justice Court. A judgment generally has to be recorded to reach the real property, so the recorded copy is what a land search finds.
• The Treasurer holds the tax position, which is a separate request from the records search.

As everywhere, the land records are indexed by party name and instrument number rather than by street address, which is why an address search begins with the Assessor and only then moves to the Recorder.

What turns up on a Las Vegas parcel

Some of this is the same everywhere. Some of it is characteristic of southern Nevada.

• Deeds of trust, including older ones that were paid but never reconveyed of record.
• Association assessment liens. Clark County is dense with common-interest communities, so a recorded declaration and an assessment lien are ordinary findings rather than unusual ones. How such a lien ranks against a lender's deed of trust is governed by Nevada statute and by litigation that has moved considerably over the years, which makes it a question for counsel rather than a matter the index settles.
• Mechanics lien notices arising from recent work, which in Nevada involve a notice process as well as the lien itself.
• Judgments and tax liens filed against the owner by name.
• Notices of default and of trustee's sale, which are the visible stages of the non-judicial process Nevada uses.
• Homestead declarations, which Nevada owners record and which a buyer or lender will want to see.

Names decide the result

Anything filed against the owner rather than against the parcel is found through an alphabetical name index, and that index returns only what it is asked for.

Clark County makes this harder than average for a straightforward reason, because a great deal of residential and investment property is held through LLCs and trusts. The entity is one index entry, the people behind it are others, and a judgment against a member does not appear under the entity's name. Add former names, married names and misspellings, and a search run on a single spelling can return a clean report while a docketed judgment sits a page away. That is a scoping problem, not a search failure, and the way our guide to finding out who owns a property describes is to widen the name list before the search rather than after it.

What a search cannot settle

A search reports what was recorded and indexed in Clark County over the period searched, with copies of the instruments found. It will not produce a payoff figure, which comes from each lienholder. It will not tell you whether a lien is valid, timely or correctly perfected, or how competing interests rank, all of which are legal questions under Nevada law. And it cannot show an unrecorded agreement or an association balance that has never been reduced to a recorded lien.

An empty result reflects the record. It is not proof that nothing is owed.

Ordering a Clark County search

For a specific property, a search of the Recorder's index against the parcel plus a name search against every owner is the practical minimum, and adding the tax position and any association balance makes it complete. Our overview of title searching in Nevada covers the statewide picture, and checking for liens on property explains the general process.

AFX Research has searched Clark County and every other Nevada county since 1995, including in-person retrieval where an older instrument is not available as an online image.