Deeds.com

August 22, 2019April 25, 2024

How’s Your Property Vested? It Matters as Much as Your Will or Trust

In estate planning, wills and trusts aren’t everything.

Homeowners who want to be sure the home passes to the desired beneficiary must be sure the property is correctly vested.

Consider a common example. If you co-own property with a right of survivorship, your interest cannot be willed to any other party. The person who survives automatically acquires rights in your interest.

Here, we review this and other consequences of the vesting of real estate.

August 16, 2019April 25, 2024

Gig Economy: The Impact on Mortgages and Real Estate Ownership

Many people hope to buy homes, but struggle to qualify for loans. And this means millions of first-time buyers are deferring their dreams of homeownership until they are in a stronger position to qualify for a mortgage loan.

Today’s renters are renting longer—often not by choice. Half of renters now in their mid 50s and older don’t anticipate buying a home any time soon, according to a survey carried out by Freddie Mac, and 15% don’t think they’ll ever be able to afford one. About a third of renters aged 40-54 don’t anticipate buying soon, with 12% predicting they, too, will never have the financial resources to buy.

Could at least part of the problem be that the mortgage industry has not adjusted to the way millions of renters work?

August 12, 2019April 25, 2024

How Real Estate Legal Descriptions and Surveys Work Together

Image of a field at sunrise with a couple of trees and a fence marking a property line. Captioned: How Real Estate Legal Descriptions and Surveys Work Together.

Real estate transactions involving home sales, deeds, mortgage loans, or deeds of trust all rely on a binding legal description. Mortgage companies, for example, need to be sure that the property is well described—and worth the money they lend to a buyer.

A properly written legal description sets forth the county and state of the property. It allows a surveyor to identify precise dimensions and correct, historical borderlines.

Indeed, the existing legal description is based on the original survey. And a key task of the current survey is a verification of the accuracy of the property’s legal description. In short, real estate legal descriptions and surveys work together.

August 5, 2019April 25, 2024

How Getting a Mortgage With a Co-Borrower Affects the Deed

Image of a smiling woman on a house lined street holding the hand of a person while leading them down the street. Captioned: How Getting a Mortgage with a Co-Borrower Affects the Deed

Loan underwriters are hard to please. When a mortgage loan approval eludes the hopeful homebuyer, another signature on the papers might be the only way to move forward.

July 29, 2019April 25, 2024

The Land Trust Approach to Affordable Housing

Rises in property values are great news for city homeowners. On the other side of the coin, they make the home buying journey that much steeper for buyers. Gentrification of near-downtown areas can make personal finances harder to handle, as property taxes go up. This is a constant challenge for U.S. cities.

Urban renewal shouldn’t mean pricing people out of the city. With that thought in mind, residents themselves are writing the next chapter in the story of affordable real estate: lasting affordability. In their quest to create permanently affordable housing, community members and leaders are teaming up to form land trust coalitions.

July 25, 2019April 25, 2024

The Real Estate Easement: A Guide and Glossary

An easement is a right to use another’s land for a specific purpose not inconsistent with the landowner’s simultaneous right to hold the same property. The word is derived from the Old French term aisier: to assist. This legal right to use land that is not one’s own can be acquired in several ways:

By grant (owner permission).
By prescription (longtime use).
By necessity. The law protects access; a property without street access would be practically useless. Thus, the landowner must allow necessary access.

A state’s Statute of Frauds typically requires that transferring any interest in real estate, even a grant of an easement, is only made binding through a signed, written agreement. Yet in some cases an easement is implied. Because the law protects access, a court may find access granted by implication, depending on the facts of a given situation.

July 22, 2019April 25, 2024

Is a Hurtful Deed Restriction Lurking in Your Deed?

Restrictive covenants are binding obligations not to do something with your property. These restrictions on real property are normally contained in a deed.

Restrictive covenants originated to keep industry out of residential areas. To this day, homeowners’ associations use deed restrictions in order to make condo owners adhere to established aesthetics or the property’s historical character.

They have also been used as grotesque tools of discrimination.

July 15, 2019April 25, 2024

Nevada Clarifies Mortgage Law, But What About Deed of Trust Lender Entry Provisions?

Image of a road though the desert in Nevada with blue skies and desert mountains in the background. Captioned: Nevada Clarifies Mortgage Law, But What About Deed of Trust Lender Entry Provisions?

In May 2019, effective October 1, 2019, Nevada passed Senate Bill 382 amending the law pertaining to deeds of trust, foreclosure sales, and homeowners’ associations.

Among other things, this is a change to Nevada Revised Statute § 40.050, whose language states that a mortgage of real property is not deemed a conveyance. If a mortgage does not constitute a conveyance, the mortgage lender may take possession on the home upon the inhabitant’s default, bypassing a judicial foreclosure sale.

Nevada employs a deed of trust between the home buyer and the lender. A deed of trust places the legal ownership of a home with a designated trustee until the buyer—who holds equitable ownership—pays off the loan.

Of course, some buyers do experience financial challenges and find themselves unable to pay their mortgages.

Here, we briefly explore the ramifications, as seen through a case that shook mortgage lenders’ expectations in homes they held legally through deeds of trust.

July 11, 2019April 25, 2024

The Gift of Real Estate: What You Need to Know

Making a home into a gift involves a gift deed. The gift deed legally transfers the title of the property from you, the grantor or donor, to another person or entity. This type of conveyance may be used to convey property as a gift from one family member to another, or to donate property to a nonprofit.

A mere promise to convey the property at some point in the future does not constitute a legally sound gift. A properly drafted deed makes a gift outright—a conveyance for no consideration. In other words, the giver makes the gift unequivocally, with no compensation expected, and no strings attached.

July 8, 2019April 25, 2024

Real Estate Title Insurance: A Brief Explanation

Title insurance emerged more than a century ago. It had a purpose: to stop swindlers from cheating buyers, by ascertaining that land was, in fact, owned by the person selling it.

Since then, it has grown into a multi-billion-dollar business.

And while today’s title insurance industry ostensibly protects homeowners from defects in their deeds, some believe it has been rendered practically obsolete in the digital age. Today, a record search can be done for less than a tenth of the prevailing rate of title insurance—which can exceed $2000, depending on the home’s price and the state in which the property sale occurs.