The free alert your county already offers — found, explained, and set up right.
Deed fraud is real: a criminal files a forged deed at the county office, and your house can be borrowed against or sold before you ever hear about it. The defense is an alert the moment something is recorded in your name — and hundreds of county recorders and clerks already run that alert free. The problem is finding it: every county calls it something different, hides it on a different website, and never advertises it. DeedWatch is the directory that pulls it all into one place, plus the setup help the county never gives you.
DeedWatch is a directory and a guide. We do not monitor your deed, we cannot prevent any filing, and we are not a government office. The alerts themselves come from your county — and they are free.
The free county checker
Pick your state and county. We will tell you plainly: whether a free alert exists, what your county calls it, who runs it, and the official signup page. Every entry in this directory was checked against the county's or state's own published source — when we have not verified a county yet, the checker says so instead of guessing.
Own property in more than one county? Check each one — enrollment is per county, every time. Own a home in a state with no verified alert yet? The kit includes the deed self-check routine built for exactly that situation.
Why this exists
“Property Fraud Alert” in one county, “Title Alert” in the next, “Recording Notification Service” in Florida, “FANS” in Georgia, a “Consumer Notification System” in Massachusetts. There is no national list — Kiplinger tells readers flatly that because there is no central database, you have to dig through your own recorder's website. This directory is that central list.
The Illinois Attorney General's published fact sheet is titled “Be Wary of Home Title Lock Services” and notes the monitoring is “typically free from many local county Recorder of Deeds offices.” The FTC has said these paid services are not insurance and do not lock or freeze anything. A county recorder in Illinois went on the record in February 2025 warning residents that TV ads resell her office's free service.
These alerts are opt-in. In Maricopa County, Arizona — home of Phoenix — only about 100,000 of roughly 1.5 million properties are enrolled in the free Title Alert that has existed since 2023. The service is not the gap. Being told it exists, and being walked through setup, is the gap. That is the product.
The honest math
| Option | What it does | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Home Title Lock (annual plan) | Monitors your title and alerts you after a change is recorded. Cannot prevent a filing. Price is per property. | $227.40 every year — $2,274 over 10 years |
| Your county's free alert | Emails, texts, or calls you when a document is recorded in your name. | $0 |
| DeedWatch Setup Kit | The directory plus step-by-step enrollment for every name variation and every property you own, the deed self-check, and the first-72-hours playbook. | $39 once |
Swipe sideways to see the whole table →
Prices verified on hometitlelock.com on October 15, 2026. The full breakdown — including what the paid service genuinely adds, and what it cannot do — is on our Home Title Lock cost page.
The $39 Setup Kit
A county listing alone fails real homeowners in four predictable ways: alerts only match the exact name recorded, enrollment is separate in every county, false alarms land with no instructions, and the alert goes to one inbox with no playbook attached. The kit exists to close those four gaps — for every property you own, in every county, for one $39 payment.
Get the Setup Kit — $39, one-time
One payment of $39. No subscription, no renewal, no per-property fee — the kit covers every property you own. The county alerts themselves are free government services and stay free.
Who needs this most
No mortgage means no lender watching the title — and the full equity is the prize. Paid-off homes are the classic deed-fraud target.
A house that sits empty half the year, in a second county — sometimes a second state — needs an enrollment in that county too. One signup never covers both.
Landlords with doors in three counties, heirs who never re-checked the deed after an estate settled, trustees whose trust name is what the alert must watch — the kit has a module for each.
No — and be suspicious of anyone who implies a directory does. DeedWatch finds your county's free alert and helps you set it up correctly. The alert itself is run by your county recorder or clerk, and it is the county that notifies you. We sell information and setup help, once, for $39.
No. Recording is an open system: a clerk generally cannot refuse a document that meets filing requirements, which is exactly why a fraudulent deed can get recorded in the first place. No monitoring service — paid or free — can prevent a filing. What an alert does is shrink the time between a fraudulent recording and you finding out, from months or years to days. That speed is what makes the fraud hard to profit from.
Yes — that is one of the situations it is built for. The deed self-check module shows you how to pull and read your own record on a set routine, which is the working substitute where no alert exists. And the directory keeps growing: as your county launches a service, its verified entry is added.
No. DeedWatch is educational information about public programs and public records. If a fraudulent document has actually been recorded against your property, that is the moment for a real-estate attorney in your state — the kit's playbook tells you exactly when that line is crossed.