Searching New Castle County Property Records

More search requests involving Delaware are about companies than about land, and the two have nothing to do with each other. A Delaware LLC that owns a warehouse in Ohio is searched in Ohio. The state of formation is a fact about the entity, not about where its property sits.

Once that is out of the way, New Castle County is a straightforward place to search, and Delaware is one of the few states where a genuinely statewide search is a small exercise.

A Delaware company is not Delaware land

The Division of Corporations holds entity formation, good standing, the registered agent, franchise tax status, and any merger or name change. It holds nothing whatever about real property, in Delaware or anywhere else.

The Recorder of Deeds in each county holds the land records for land in that county, indexed by the names of the parties like everywhere else.

Where this goes wrong is ordering the wrong search. A request to search a Delaware entity produces corporate records and answers no property question, and a request to search Delaware land on the strength of a Delaware entity answers a question about a parcel nobody owns. It costs an order rather than a closing, which is the cheap way to learn it, and it is the single most common confusion on files touching this state.

Where New Castle County keeps it

The Recorder of Deeds records deeds, mortgages and satisfactions, easements, restrictive covenants, plots and liens against real property.

Court filings are split by the kind of matter. Superior Court handles judgments at law. The Court of Chancery handles equity, which in Delaware includes quiet title, partition and specific performance, and which is the court most people associate with the state for entirely different reasons. The Register of Wills handles estates.

Assessment and tax sit with the county, and Delaware is notable for having used assessment base years that ran decades behind current values until a recent statewide reassessment. Municipal taxes, including Wilmington, are billed separately from the county bill.

What a New Castle County search covers

• The chain of title over the term you specify, with the recorded instruments attached rather than summarized.
• Mortgages and satisfactions, along with any assignments filed since.
• Liens and judgments of record, including mechanics liens, tax liens and judgments docketed against the owner.
• Easements, covenants and plot restrictions, which in the older Wilmington neighborhoods and the early planned communities can be very old indeed.
• Tax status, including any municipal charges billed outside the county system.

What the record will not tell you

An unrecorded instrument is not in the index, and under Delaware law a conveyance can be good between the parties while being ineffective against a later purchaser without notice. Whether that applies in a given case is a legal question for counsel.

A search also says nothing about the entity that owns the property. Whether a company is in good standing, who controls it and who may sign for it come from the Division of Corporations and from the entity’s own documents, which are private.

Boundaries are the other limit. A legal description is not a survey and a search does not locate anything on the ground, nor does it report the condition of a building or who is occupying it.

Ordering a New Castle County search

Supply the street address, the parcel identifier if you have it, and every name the property has been held in, including entities. If the question is about a company rather than a parcel, say so, because that is a corporate records request and a different piece of work.

A title search reports what was recorded and indexed in the offices searched, as of the day the work was done. It is not proof that nothing else exists, it is not a title insurance commitment and it is not a legal opinion. Our report names the indexes reviewed and attaches copies of what was found.