Ohio Assignment of Mortgage (Individual)

The Ohio Assignment of Mortgage (Individual) is built around a single name: one assignor, a natural person who holds a recorded Ohio mortgage in that person's own name, signing once and acknowledging once. The configuration is printed on the instrument as fixed text, and the instrument places the transfer of the mortgage and its note to the new holder on the record of the county where the land lies.

One name, one signature, one certificate

Section 1 of the form opens with a fixed sentence: the assignor named below is an individual acting in the assignor's own right and holds the mortgage described in Section 3 in the assignor's own name. The assignor's name and mailing address are the only entries that follow it. The form carries one signature block, with the printed name Ohio Revised Code Section 317.11 calls for beneath a signature, and one acknowledgment certificate in the wording of the statutory short form for an individual, Section 147.55(A). There is no second assignor block, no marital status recital, no spouse signature line, and no fiduciary or entity capacity to fill in, because the configuration is fixed rather than selected.

The patterns that present this configuration in the county records include a private lender who made a mortgage loan in the lender's own name and transfers it to a note buyer, a parent who lent a child the purchase money and moves the resulting mortgage into a trust the parent created, and an individual who holds a mortgage securing a business loan and sells it at a discount. The form is not set up as an assignment by a corporation, a limited liability company, a bank, a trustee or executor, an attorney-in-fact, or two or more holders together, and it assigns the assignor's entire interest rather than a part of it. The assignee block receives one or two assignees by name with the mailing address Section 5301.32 requires.

A lien that travels with its debt

Ohio prescribes no form for an assignment of mortgage, so the operative words are the conventional ones: for value received, the assignor assigns, transfers, and sets over the mortgage to the assignee, with every right, title, and interest the assignor holds in it, the promissory note, and the rest of the debt the mortgage secures. The instrument then restates what Section 5301.31 provides about every Ohio mortgage assignment, by whichever method it is made: the lien passes, and with it all of the mortgagee's interest in the land the mortgage describes. The form does not endorse the note and does not release or satisfy the mortgage; a satisfaction is the separate certificate Section 5301.34 describes.

The chain the recorder notes against the mortgage

Sections 3 and 4 identify the mortgage by mortgagor, original mortgagee, date, principal amount, recording county, recording reference, and recording date, and then identify any earlier assignment of record under which the assignor holds, or state that there is none. The recording reference is what the county recorder uses to note the assignment against the mortgage, and Section 317.32(C) charges a marginal reference fee of four dollars for it beside the deed recording fee that Section 5301.32 applies to a separate instrument of assignment. Section 5 carries the land: county, parcel number, the legal description copied from the mortgage, the municipal corporation or township, and the street address, the indexing description Section 5301.46 calls for in a county that keeps sectional indexes.

Recording an instrument that is not a deed

Because the assignment transfers a lien rather than title to land, the auditor's stamps Section 317.22 requires before a deed of absolute conveyance is recorded, and the conveyance fee statement of Section 319.202, do not reach it; no conveyance fee and no county transfer tax attach to the assignment of a mortgage. What does apply is the recorder's standard format rule, Section 317.114: a three inch blank top margin on the first page, one inch side and bottom margins, and print no smaller than ten point, which the form meets with twelve point type. The preparer statement Section 317.111 requires and a return address block close the instrument.

The package includes the fillable Assignment of Mortgage (Individual) form, a completed example filled in for a Hamilton County mortgage assigned by one individual holder, and the guide that covers each section, the certificate, and recording at the county. This description and the guide explain the form and the Ohio statutes that govern it in general terms; neither is legal advice.