Everyone else charges
by the property

Pulling the RTC, the EC and the parent deed off the portals in your own time.

Free apart from the statutory record fees, and genuinely useful as a first-pass filter before you spend money on anything. You can confirm that a survey number exists, that the seller appears on the RTC, and that no obvious charge sits on the recent encumbrance certificate. What you cannot do is know what you did not look at. Bhoomi tells you the current holder but not how the right reached them. The EC covers only the period and the exact parcel description you searched, so a transaction indexed under a slightly different extent is invisible. CERSAI, eCourts and the survey record are separate systems entirely, and nothing on any portal tells you that a document is missing.

Typically used for: A first-pass filter before commissioning real diligence.

A bank-empanelled advocate producing a search report and title opinion per file.

The standard route inside secured lending. The advocate is on a panel, the fee is fixed and usually recovered from the borrower, and the output is a short search report with an opinion attached. The constraint is structural rather than personal: panel fees are set for volume, so the search that gets done is the search the fee supports, typically the encumbrance certificate, the RTC, the parent deed and whatever the borrower supplied. Sources needing separate effort tend not to be reached, which is why a CERSAI charge, a pending phodi or a Section 79B restriction on the original grant surfaces after sanction rather than before it.

Typically used for: High-volume retail lending where a fixed low fee per file is the operating constraint.

A specialist engaged directly for a full thirty-year search and opinion.

The route most buyers and many corporate teams take for a property that matters. An experienced property advocate brings local memory of how a village or layout came to be, a view on whether a defect is material or merely untidy, and standing relationships at the sub-registrar and revenue offices. The cost is time and repeatability. A full search runs two to four weeks per property, most of it spent physically gathering records rather than reasoning about them, and the search is as good as the individual doing it.

Typically used for: A single property where the buyer wants a named advocate personally accountable.

A firm running full title due diligence inside a transaction mandate.

What gets commissioned when title diligence is one workstream in a larger deal. A firm brings structure, partner review, and the ability to carry a finding straight into the transaction documents, indemnities and conditions precedent. It is the most rigorous manual route and the most expensive by a wide margin, because the same associates who reason about risk are also the ones ordering encumbrance certificates and waiting at the registry. Billing is per hour or per mandate, revisions are billed again, and diligence is usually the long pole in the deal timetable.

Typically used for: Transaction mandates where diligence feeds indemnities and conditions precedent.

Your own lawyers pulling records and assembling the chain themselves.

Common at lenders and developers with a standing pipeline, and the true cost is almost always understated because it never appears on an invoice. The team knows the business, the risk appetite and the history of the sites, which is a real advantage. What they spend their hours on is not that. It is portal downtime, Kannada records, certified copy queues, and rebuilding the same chain when the seller produces one more document. Loaded cost per property usually exceeds an external fee once the hours are counted honestly.

Typically used for: Teams with a standing pipeline who want the reasoning kept in-house.

An enterprise engagement priced on the portfolio rather than the file.

This is us

Deedwise gathers from every government source that issues a record, reconstructs the chain, runs the 23-check Title Check Standard against it, links every finding to its source document, and hands the file to your counsel to review and sign. It is sold as an enterprise engagement with a minimum monthly commitment on terms set per organisation, which means the unit you pay for is your pipeline rather than a report. That is the whole commercial point: every method above is priced per property, so a forty-parcel acquisition pays forty times and waits forty times.

Typically used for: Banks, NBFCs and housing finance companies clearing collateral, developers and funds acquiring land, and law firms who want collection done before they write the opinion.