HeritageDeed

It does the courthouse legwork, not the legal judgment

A title search in the US normally means visiting or querying several separate offices: the county recorder or clerk for deeds and mortgages, the assessor for the parcel, the courts for judgments and lis pendens, and the tax office. HeritageDeed’s pitch is that it queries those sources in parallel. It first matches the address to the official parcel record (in New York City it resolves the borough, block and lot, and tells a condominium’s master lot apart from an individual unit), then pulls the recorded instruments for that parcel.

The useful part is what it does with them. Each mortgage is matched against a recorded satisfaction, and anything left without a release is flagged as open at the top of the report. An AI-written plain-English summary and a 1–10 risk score open every report, and every finding carries its document ID, recording date and the office that holds it, so an attorney or title company can pull the original.

We read the sample report the site publishes: a real search run on October 3, 2026 for the Empire State Building at 350 Fifth Avenue. It lists six deeds, eleven mortgages with none counted as open, four satisfactions, three court cases, flood zone and nearby EPA sites, and a note that commercial property may need a full title examination for larger transactions. The summary carries the label “Generated by AI” and asks the reader to verify every statement against the records that follow it.

Twenty-one counties, nine states, and nothing else

Coverage is narrow and listed openly. At review time the coverage page named 21 counties in 9 states, with New York City the deepest:

• New York: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island, and Erie County
• Florida: Duval, Hillsborough, Brevard, Manatee, Pasco and Okaloosa counties
• Illinois: Cook County
• Pennsylvania: Philadelphia County
• Texas: Harris and McLennan counties
• Arizona: Maricopa County
• Arkansas: Pulaski County
• North Carolina: Durham and Forsyth counties
• South Carolina: Horry County (Myrtle Beach)

Orders outside these areas are refused before payment. Each county has its own page saying which offices are searched. The Cook County page, for example, lists the County Clerk’s recordings, the Assessor, federal court records and FEMA/EPA data. Record depth varies with each county’s index, the site says.

Free for now, $49 a report later

At review time the homepage said reports were free during the launch, with a list price of $49 per report. There is one product, called a Current Owner Search, with no tiers, no subscription and no account; sales tax is added at checkout where it applies, and payments go through a merchant of record called Creem. The site promises a full refund if a report can’t be delivered within 24 hours, and a free re-run if one of the sources was down when the report ran.

The site doesn’t say when the launch period ends, so treat “free” as temporary.

Not title insurance, and the site says so three times

This matters more than any feature. The FAQ states that HeritageDeed does not issue title insurance or legal opinions, and that the report is not a certified abstract of title. Anything you plan to rely on at a closing or in court, it says, should be confirmed by a licensed title professional against the official records cited. Public records themselves can contain errors, and an automated name match on a court case can point at a different person with the same name; the report itself warns about that.

In other words, it is a fast first pass for due diligence, before you pay a title company, not a replacement for one.

Arabic support: none, and no use outside the US

The site is English only. The page is declared as English, there is no language switcher, and the reports are written in English. More important for our readers: the tool searches US county records only. It cannot check a title in Riyadh, Cairo, Dubai or anywhere else in the Arab world, and nothing on the site suggests that is planned.

It becomes relevant to an Arabic-speaking reader only when the property is in one of the covered US counties: someone buying a rental in Florida or Texas from abroad, or an investor screening a Manhattan condo before involving a lawyer.

Who should use it, and who shouldn’t

A good fit

• Buyers and investors checking a property in one of the 21 covered counties before making an offer or hiring a title company.
• Real estate agents, lenders and attorneys who want a quick preliminary read on open mortgages and liens, with document numbers ready to pull.
• Developers who want the findings as JSON for their own systems.

Look elsewhere if

• Your property is outside those counties, in the US or anywhere else.
• You need something you can rely on at closing. That still takes a title examiner, an attorney and title insurance.
• You need the interface or the report in Arabic.

Our view: within its small map, HeritageDeed is an honest, well-sourced shortcut through scattered public records, and its own disclaimers are unusually clear. Outside that map, it has nothing to offer.