Connecticut’s home-buying process shares the same broad stages as most states — offer, inspection, financing, title, closing — but a handful of pieces are handled quite differently here: the closing is a licensed attorney’s job by statute, not a title company’s, the transfer tax is really two taxes stacked on top of each other, and the state’s genuinely old housing stock makes the title search a more involved exercise than in most of the country. This walks through where Connecticut’s process diverges from the generic version.
Connecticut closings are run by a licensed attorney — this isn’t optional
Connecticut is an attorney-closing state by statute, not just by custom. Effective October 1, 2019, Public Act 19-88 made it a legal requirement that only a Connecticut-licensed attorney conduct a real estate closing for a mortgage loan transaction or any sale where a lender’s or mortgagee’s title insurance policy is issued — which covers essentially every financed purchase in the state. The law was passed largely in response to “witness-only” and “notary-only” closings that had been cutting attorneys out of the process. Someone who isn’t a licensed Connecticut attorney conducting one of these closings is committing the unauthorized practice of law, which carries real criminal exposure.
In practice, this means your closing attorney (or the seller’s, or a shared one depending on how the deal is structured) is a central figure in your purchase from the outset, not an optional add-on the way it is in a title-company state.
The title search is where Connecticut’s old housing stock actually shows up
Your closing attorney will run a full title search against the town’s land records before closing. Property is assessed by each town’s own Municipal Assessor (Connecticut, like the rest of New England, doesn’t use county-level assessment), and deeds are recorded with the Town Clerk’s land records office — not a county recorder. RefPages’ County Records directory links to your specific town’s assessor and land records search tools.
Connecticut law sets a 40-year “root of title” rule (Conn. Gen. Stat. § 47-33b): a private claim, easement, or interest older than 40 years is generally extinguished unless it’s been specifically preserved in a more recent deed. That’s a useful backstop, but it doesn’t reach everything — municipal tax liens, utility easements, and certain state or federal claims never expire under that rule — and Connecticut’s housing stock is old enough, in the state’s older towns especially, that a title search here more often runs into genuinely antique deeds, easements, and boundary language than it would in a newer-built state. This is exactly the kind of thing your closing attorney is there to sort through, but it’s worth knowing that “the title search takes a while” is a more normal experience in Connecticut than it might be elsewhere.
Connecticut’s conveyance tax is really two taxes
Connecticut’s real estate conveyance tax has a state component and a municipal component, both due at closing. The state portion is bracketed: 0.75% on the first $800,000 of the sale price, 1.25% on the portion between $800,000 and $2,500,000, and 2.25% above that. The municipal portion is typically 0.25% of the full price in most towns, but a list of municipalities — including Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport, Stamford, and a number of others — are authorized to charge up to 0.50%. By custom the seller pays the conveyance tax, though like everything else in the contract, that allocation is negotiable. Because both the state brackets and the list of higher-rate municipalities have changed by statute in recent years, confirm the current numbers for your specific town before you rely on an estimate.
What sellers have to disclose — on a specific state form
Connecticut requires sellers of residential property with four units or fewer to complete a state-prescribed Residential Property Condition Report (under the Uniform Property Condition Disclosure Act, Conn. Gen. Stat. § 20-327b) and deliver it to the buyer before any binder or purchase contract is signed. The report runs nine sections and roughly 65 questions covering the structure, systems, and known defects. Notably, the law doesn’t force a seller to fill it out: a seller who skips the report simply owes the buyer a $500 credit at closing instead. Some sellers take that trade deliberately rather than complete a lengthy disclosure — which is worth keeping in mind if you receive a $500 credit instead of a filled-out report and want to know why.
After closing
Connecticut doesn’t have a home-buyer-facing exemption or permit-adjacent deadline comparable to a homestead filing. If an inspection turns up something that needs permitted work before or after you move in — not unusual, given the age of a lot of Connecticut housing stock — RefPages’ Building Permit Departments directory links to the relevant town’s building department.