When purchasing a foreclosure at the auction how do you guys perform the title search? Do you hire a title company or do it yourself? I'm not educated enough to perform the search myself.

I feel that if I hire a title company then I could be wasting money on the search because I've done a few test runs on properties only to find out that the owner has claimed bankruptcy or has settled with the lender when I arrived at the courthouse. Now if I hired a company to perform the title search on these properties, then I would be out that money. So basically here are my questions:

1) How do you perform a title search for the foreclosure property?

2) How long does a title search take if performed by a title company?

Thanks
Pete