Searching DeKalb County Property Records

DeKalb County sits immediately east of downtown Atlanta and holds a slice of the city itself, along with Decatur, Brookhaven, Dunwoody, Chamblee, Doraville, Tucker, Stonecrest, Clarkston, Avondale Estates, Lithonia, Pine Lake and Stone Mountain. It is dense, it is old in places and brand new in others, and it uses two Georgia conventions that catch out anyone arriving from another state.

The first is which office holds the land record. The second is what a mortgage is called here, and why that is not merely a naming difference.

The clerk of superior court holds the land record

Georgia does not have a separate county recorder. Deeds, security deeds, assignments, cancellations, liens, plats and restrictive covenants are all filed with the clerk of superior court, the same office that holds the civil case file. Land records and court records live under one roof, and that is a genuine convenience.

Georgia clerks also feed a statewide electronic filing and search system, so an instrument filed in DeKalb is visible through the same channel as one filed three counties away. That helps a great deal when an owner holds property in several counties, although the index is only ever as good as what was typed into it.

The board of assessors holds the parcel identification and the appraised value, and the tax commissioner holds tax status, exemptions, and any tax execution issued against the property. The roll follows the recorded deeds rather than the other way round, so it is a fast route from an address to a parcel and it is not evidence of ownership.

A security deed is not a mortgage

Georgia secures real estate loans with a deed to secure debt, usually called a security deed. It is not a lien against the property. It conveys legal title to the lender, leaving the borrower with the right to get that title back on payment.

For a search this changes how the chain reads. The lender appears as a grantee in the deed index rather than as a lienholder in a separate book, so somebody skimming for transfers can mistake a financing for a sale. When the loan is paid, what gets recorded is a cancellation rather than a satisfaction of mortgage, and an old security deed with no cancellation of record is a title problem rather than a footnote.

Foreclosure follows from the same structure. Georgia uses a power of sale, exercised outside court, with notice advertised in the county legal organ newspaper. The recorded trail is a deed under power rather than a court judgment, and the advertisement itself is not a county record at all.

Several of the cities are very new

This is the local fact that costs people time. A number of DeKalb municipalities incorporated only in the last twenty years, and when a city forms it takes over permitting, code enforcement and some utility billing from the county.

A property in Brookhaven or Stonecrest may therefore have its permit history split across two custodians, with the older half at the county and the newer half at the city. Asking which city a parcel sits in is not a formality here, and a parcel with an Atlanta mailing address may be in DeKalb County rather than Fulton.

Tax sales and the redemption period

Georgia tax sales leave a trail worth reading carefully. A tax execution is issued, the property is sold, and the purchaser receives a tax deed that does not immediately become clean title. A statutory redemption period follows, and the purchaser must serve a barment notice before the right to redeem is cut off.

A chain carrying a tax deed therefore raises a sequence question rather than a simple ownership question, and the documents that answer it are recorded over a span of years.

What a DeKalb County search establishes

A search reports what was recorded and found in the indexes reviewed over the term searched, in the county where the property sits. It is not an inventory of everything affecting a property, an empty result does not prove a parcel is unencumbered, and recording and indexing practice varies county by county. Whether a cancellation was effective, whether a barment notice was properly served, and whether title is good today are conclusions for an attorney licensed in Georgia.