Top 5 Common Car Title Problems

The top five most common vehicle title problems.

Jump to Title Issues
The first one is a jump-to-title where you have a title for a vehicle that is signed over but the original title owners were two, three, or four owners ago, so you can’t sign that many times on one title, and the prior ownership chain is broken where you don’t have a clear chain of title, and that’s one of the biggest types of problems that we fix.

Liens on vehicles
The second one is a lien on a vehicle. This is where there’s a bank or lending institution that has a lien recorded on the title. The loan itself might be paid off to zero, or the bank might not have any requirement to pay any more money, but the lien is still recorded with the title records at the DMV. That’s the second most common thing we see when we fix titles.

Damaged Documents
The third one is a damaged document. This is when you actually have the title; the legal title document is in hand, but there’s some damage or erasure. Sometimes people cross things out or put white-out, and that voids the title; it’s not usable by the DMV.

Purged Records
Number four are purged records. This is when the prior history of that vehicle in the ownership history has been removed from the DMV record that’s been deleted because it’s so old. Some states do it after five years, some are seven, and some are ten. It depends on the age of the car too, but once those records are deleted, it’s very difficult to create a new title history.

Auction Title Woes
And the last one that we deal with is our auction titles. When a person buys a vehicle from an auction, the auction either doesn’t give the right paperwork or they provide the paperwork, and then it’s damaged or it’s the wrong kind. Sometimes it’s a certificate of destruction, a salvage title, or a rebuild title. In those cases, there’s a lot of legwork to get that squared away. So those are the top five things we see. It’s very likely that one of those applies to you, and that’s why you’re looking to get a title for your vehicle.

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