Today, we’re going to talk about the top five most common vehicle title problems.

1. The first one is a jump title, where you have a title for a vehicle. That is signed over, but the original title owner was two, three, or four owners ago. So you can’t sign that many times on one title, and the prior ownership chain is broken, so you don’t have a clear chain of titles. And that’s one of the biggest types of problems that we fix.
2. 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.
3. 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 that sometimes crosses things out or puts white on them, and that voids the title. It’s not usable by the DMV.
4. Number four is a purged record. This is when the prior history of that vehicle and the ownership history have been removed from the DMV records because it’s so old. Some states do it after five years, some after seven, and some after 10. It also depends on the age of the car. But once those records are deleted, it’s very difficult to create a new title history.
5. 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 do and then it’s damaged or it’s the wrong kind. Sometimes it’s a certificate of destruction, a salvage title, or a rebuilt 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.