How to Run a Lien Search on a Boat Before You Buy

The worst boat story I know is a straightforward one. Buyer pays $180,000 cash for a sportfish in Georgia, gets a bill of sale, runs the boat home to Charleston. Fourteen months later a US Marshal tapes a notice to the windscreen because the previous owner's bank had a preferred ship mortgage recorded in 2019 and had not been paid since.

The buyer owned the boat. The bank owned the debt. The debt was attached to the hull.

Cost of the search that would have found it: about $60.

How do I check if a boat has a lien on it?

For a documented vessel, order an Abstract of Title from the Coast Guard's National Vessel Documentation Center. It lists every instrument recorded against that hull — mortgages, notices of claim of lien, releases, bills of sale — in date order, back to first documentation.

For an undocumented boat, there is no single federal record, so you run three searches: the state titling agency where the boat is titled, a UCC filing search in the seller's state of residence, and the state where the boat has been kept if that differs.

The abstract is the strongest of these by a distance, which is one more argument for buying documented boats.

Reading an abstract without a lawyer

An abstract is a plain chronological list, and what you are looking for is simple: every mortgage should have a matching satisfaction or release.

1. 01Find the current owner's acquisition — a bill of sale to the seller you are dealing with.
2. 02Walk forward from there. Every recorded mortgage after that date needs a release filed after it.
3. 03Check the dates line up. A release recorded three days before the abstract was pulled is fine but worth a question.
4. 04Look for notices of claim of lien, which are usually filed by yards and are a signal of a dispute.
5. 05Confirm the vessel's official number and HIN match the boat you are looking at.

If any mortgage is open, do not accept a payoff promise. The correct mechanism is an escrow closing where the lender is paid directly from funds and files the satisfaction before the balance releases to the seller.

What an abstract will not show you

This is the part that gets missed, and it is genuinely important.

Maritime liens for necessaries — unpaid dockage, yard work, fuel, crew wages, salvage — are valid without being recorded anywhere. They arise by operation of law the moment the service is provided and unpaid. An abstract can be completely clean while a boatyard in Stuart holds a valid claim for $34,000 of unpaid work.

So alongside the abstract, do two cheap things:

• Ask the current marina for a written zero-balance letter.
• Ask the last yard that hauled the boat for the same.

Sellers occasionally bristle at this. That reaction is itself informative.

The undocumented boat problem

Below five net tons, or on any boat the owner simply never documented, there is no federal record and the searching gets messier.

The third row is the one people skip. A boat that has moved from Michigan to Florida can carry a Michigan lien notation that Florida's title never picked up, because the boat was retitled on a bill of sale without a proper lien check. That happens more often than the system would like to admit.

Check the hull number yourself

The Hull Identification Number is twelve characters moulded into the starboard side of the transom, near the top. Federal law has required it since 1972. It must match the title, the documentation, the insurance binder and the survey.

Go and look at it with your own eyes and a torch. Photograph it. Then compare it character by character against the paperwork, because an I and a 1 look similar in moulded plastic and a transposition on a title is a genuine problem at registration time.

Three things that should stop the transaction cold: a HIN plate that has been filled and re-stamped, a second HIN found in the bilge or under a hatch that does not match the transom, or a seller who is reluctant to let you photograph it. Boat theft in the United States is not enormous but it is not zero, and re-HINed hulls are the usual method.

The order to do this in

Timing matters, because you do not want to spend money on a survey for a boat with a title problem.

1. 01Get the HIN and official number from the listing.
2. 02Order the abstract or run the state searches. Two to five days, under $100.
3. 03Read it. Ask about anything open.
4. 04Get the marina and yard zero-balance letters.
5. 05Then book the surveyor and the sea trial.
6. 06Close through escrow or a documented closing agent, never by wire straight to a private seller.

That sequence costs about $80 and a week. The alternative costs a boat.

My honest view is that title work is the least glamorous and highest-return part of buying a boat, and it is the part most buyers hand-wave because the surveyor feels like the real gatekeeper. The surveyor tells you whether the boat is sound. The abstract tells you whether it is yours.

We pull an abstract on every documented hull we list, publish the result on the listing, and re-pull it within ten days of closing. That second pull is not paranoia. Instruments can be recorded while a deal is pending.