Clearing Title - YouTube

Hi. Lee Phillips here. I want to talk about

clearing title or quieting a title.

You have a piece of real estate.

you've got a deed to the piece of real estate

but somehow the deed's not right.

The guy who gave it to you when he signed

when he got the piece of property

it was deeded to him as "Robert E. Lee".

When he gave the property to you

he only signed the deed "Robert Lee".

Is that the same guy? I don't know.

So your title is flawed. It has a cloud on it.

The property description in this title

and the next title aren't the same.

There are just tons of reasons why you would want to quiet a title

or to clear a title somehow.

For example, dad died

and the sister lived in the house for 20 years.

Now we're selling the house.

Well, the deed's in dad's name.

Dad's not there to sign.

"Oh go through probate." No, no, no, no, no.

Probate you always have to file within X number of months after dad dies.

It's a year, 9 months, 2 years, depends on the state.

So we can't do probate anymore.

The only thing we can do is we can go to court

and in that case we can have a determination of heirs

or we could have a quiet title action.

If the deed is flawed,

we're going to have to clear the title

we're going to have to have a quiet title action from the court somehow.

Once the court says, "No, everything's cool"

"Yeah, there's this flaw on the chain of title,"

"but we're going to correct it."

And according to the law according to courts,

we now have good title.

Now we've cleared the title.

Now we've taken the cloud off the title.

We have a clean title.

The title insurance company will give us the title policy.

I can get the mortgage because I've got the title policy.

You can do all of this stuff.

So it isn't unusual to have a flawed deed somehow

and living revocable trusts--I get flawed deeds quite often

because there are three things that you have to have in that deed

when you move it from you to the living revocable trust

if you don't have those three things, you're in trouble.

You've got to have the name of the trust,

you've got to have the date of the trust

and you've got to have the trustee's name .

So it's the Ugly Life Trust

it's the Under Agreement September 3rd, 2006

John Doe, Trustee.

If I don't have all three of those elements

and I see one or two deeds a year

where the lawyer has prepared it

and he didn't put Under Agreement (U/A), such and such a date.

Or he didn't put the trustees.

So those things have

those three elements have to be there in a deed

that's gone into a trust.

And I see that screwed up often.

And we have to go to court.

We have to get the court to give us a title

say "Yep, we understood"

"yep you guys screwed up."

"Yeah, we know it's supposed to be in this living trust, it's supposed to go to these people."

And the court gives their stamp of approval on it

then I have a clean title.

Until then, you can't sell the piece of property.

It doesn't work.

This is all in the probate court process.

So you're in probate court

even though you're just quieting the title

or determining the heirs whatever it is, this is all probate stuff

indirectly or directly. Probate courts are huge.

huge we have a video out on probate and

you can look at that.

This is Lee Phillips talking about quieting title or clearing the title.