RE: Bob, it's a little hard to tell ecltxay what information you have and what you're looking to find from your post. First let me give you a little disclaimer. The information below should not be relied upon and in the event that you need legal advice you should consult an attorney. The information below is general information not intended as specific advice to any particular question or issue and should not be relied upon as legal advice for any specific purpose.Assuming you know of a particular parcel that has a right to water from a well on another parcel there may or may not be an recorded well agreement, although a well agreement should have been done. If a well agreement was done it may be titled as or termed as any number of things including an easement. If it was done as an easement, it may refer to the benefited parcel as the dominant estate. If you are looking for documents concerning the well it would probably be best to have your title search cover the parcel on which the well is located. The property on which the well is located and any properties over which water lines run to the dominant estate are referred to as the encumbered property, or sometimes the servient estate when discussing easements).In King County, you can access certain more recently recorded documents for free directly through the county recorder on line. But the easiest and probably most reliable way is to contact a title company. Unfortuantely I think they now all charge a small fee for customer service so you likely will have to pay to get what you're looking for. On the county web site in King Co you can search for records for free, and if the record is from after about 1990 a lot of times you can pull the text of the document up on line. In my experience, this isn't a very reliable way to find documents, especially if you don't already have the recording number or the document isn't an ordinary deed or something similar. Also, I don't think the smaller counties offer this type of access yet, although Pierce and Snohomish might.You can also go to the King County Dept of Records and do a search on their computer or maybe on micro fiche(?), but in 25+ years of dealing with title issues, I don't think I ever did that.The common way to access documents is to contact a title company. There are a couple of ways to pursue this. If you know that a particular parcel is benefited or encumbered by a well agreement recorded against the property, you could ask the customer service department to search the title of the parcel for a well agreement and any amendments thereto and to email you a copy. They will likely charge you a fee, probably a few dollars per document for this service. There is no guaranty that they will find the document even if there actually is a well agreement recorded against the property. There are a number of reasons for this including that they may have screwed up or that the ageement is titled as something other than a Well Agreement or that the agreement is burried in some other document with a different title. This is just a search by a customer service person and the title company has no liability to you even if the customer service person is incompetent and fails to find a well agreement that has been recorded. I would ask them for the price for the service before I had them do anything. It's usually a small fee so I sometimes would contact a couple of different title companies and ask for the same thing just in case one company didn't do a good job on the search. Also, I think some companies won't event do customer service work for people who aren't attorney's or realtors or others who can refer them business so you might have to contact a couple of companies to find one that will help you.If you know which parcel has the well on it, probably the most accurate alternative would be to contact a title company and request a Preliminary Commitment for Title Insurance on that Parcel, including copies of all the underlying documents. If there is a well agreement, it should be recorded against that parcel, and listed in the commitment for title insurance as an exception to title with a full copy of the recorded document included in the group of underlying documents. The fee for the title insurance would be several hundred dollars at minimum. But you don't intend to buy the policy so they will end up charging you a cancellation fee for the title commitment which used to run about $50 plus tax (maybe a little more now).When you call the title company you probably want to have the tax parcel number and address of the property with the well on it. If you have the legal description and the owners name that would probably also be helpful to the title insurance company. Rate this comment: 0 0
