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.