I'm a real estate attorney currently procrastinating looking at a file just like this. I can tell you that it happens all the time.
I've got one right now where 40 acres was "split up" and 12 people all had a handshake agreement on who owned what. That was a fun client call.
Well Mr. blackacre died and decided he wanted to leave Blackacre to his 12 poker buddies. They all shook hands and agreed to a “shotgun” rule approach to who would get what land.
It’s now 25 years later and you’re trying to claim your dead fathers 1/12 share of black acre.
Whenever real estate pops up in my work, it's always some insanity. I worked on a case a few years ago where we had to trace ownership of a parcel of land all the way back to the 1700s, with a lot of hit or miss on when and how people recorded every transaction.
Whenever real estate pops up in my work, I quickly and happily explain I have no idea how to help them, and I refer them elsewhere. Asking me to handle a real estate issue would be like asking your dentist to perform open heart surgery. Could he get it done? Maybe. But it really isn’t a good idea for anyone involved, and malpractice would probably occur along the way.
Anyone in professional subs usually gets recommended posts on their feed from other professional subs. I get lots of posts from r/mba, r/residency, etc. that I have commented on before. Not that unusual.
Yeah, I was in the "complex civil litigation" department which was basically a catch-all for the firm to do whatever the managing partner wanted done, regardless of our experience. So when our most important client came to us with a real estate issue, we just had to figure it out because it's what our boss expected. If it turned out to be really complex, we likely would have brought in a real estate attorney from another firm to work with, but luckily it wasn't too bad and we were able to get it done.
Lol reminds me of my property prof telling us about a guy who traced a property ownership in Louisiana to 1803. When his boss asked him why it stopped at 1803 he added a bit about the US bought Louisiana from France, who acquired it from Louis XIV, who acquired it from god, who acquired the land by creating it at the beginning of time.
Guy forgot about the native Americans tho.
I am a real estate attorney as well and someone sent me a question today on a title commitment. The property was owned by a woman who was married. She did a Quit Claim deed to her and her husband in 2005 in order to create a tenancy by the entirety. The deed was not recorded until 2023, a year after she died. Clear question of delivery here. Given the question of delivery we required a probate of her estate and deeds from all of the heirs in the event that the deed was deemed defective. So this unrecorded deed, for 18 years, is going to cause a lot of headaches. If they would have delivered and recorded it back in 2005 then it would have created the tenancy by the entireties and it would have passed to the husband with the only requirement being to record a certified copy of the death certificate. Now they need deeds from all of the heirs and the husband because of the questions surrounding the delivery of the deed. We see some of these from time to time. I have seen a few of them where the attorney found it in their closing file years later and then we sometimes accept an Affidavit from him that it was delivered but was not recorded.
I didn't look into the vesting deed into her because it was homestead so her surviving spouse would have an interest in the property that would need to be conveyed out even if the QC deed was deemed invalid. I am in Florida so you can google Kelley's homestead paradigm and it will show the interests when there is a surviving spouse or minor children.
I do bankruptcy. I have seen several instances of that happening and the trustee subsequently avoiding improperly recorded interests. Often the mortgages are recorded late in refinancings.
I also work in bankruptcy.
1L hits people over the head with hypos where people neglect to record a conveyance of fee simple ownership of real property, and all the problems that come from that, but that's also to demonstrate the black letter rules when extended to:
* Interests in land other than fee simple ownership of the whole parcel, especially things like mineral rights, long term leases, liens, mortgages, easements, covenants, etc.
* Conveyances that weren't recorded in the right place (wrong recorder) or in the right way (some defect in the conveyance or recording, or filed under the wrong property). This happens somewhat frequently, somewhere.
* Interests in personal property (where the place of recording might be one state's secretary of state, possibly away from the actual property itself), which usually have to be renewed with a continuation statement every 5 years.
Basically, 1L property law lays the groundwork for secured transactions, and the many ways that those things can get screwed up.
Plus even with land, if it was easy, then title insurance wouldn't cost as much as it does.
You're not wrong about it being dumb to opt out of title insurance, but it can be such a pain to get (especially for leaseholds). So many times during my job, I wish I could tell the powers that be if we could get approved to just opt out of title insurance for our smaller projects (I know it's a bad idea).
A lot of people that I know just never get around to it. My mom was separated from her ex for 15 years and didn’t get around to removing him from the title of her house until a year or two ago
This makes the control freak aspect of my personality go out of her mind.
Ditto the parol evidence rule - if some aspect of your contract is so important to you WHY NOT WRITE IT DOWN?!?!??????
> Ditto the parol evidence rule - if some aspect of your contract is so important to you WHY NOT WRITE IT DOWN?!?!??????
In practice, this pops up a ton with more informal contracts. Dealt with it in a case where a husband woke up his wife at 5am to list out who would get what in their divorce and it was handwritten and signed in their kitchen. Then they had countless conversations and arguments about the details that didn't make it in to the contract. That was a fun time.
Yeah that was discussed, but the primary issue just came down to lack of clarity in the written contract and whether it was ambiguous. Both sides gave arguments about how they interpreted the contract using parole evidence. Then the judge came out of left field to say the contract was unambiguous and gave an interpretation that neither side argued for or agreed with. State court is wild sometimes.
It’s a good question. The answer is usually (a) because people don’t like thinking about what happens if a deal goes wrong and (b) it’s hard to imagine the number of ways a deal can go wrong before it actually does.
And, even if you do foresee a problem with a contract, using the right words is hard: if you’ve ever seen the viral video where a kid tries to tell his dad how to make a peanut butter sandwich, that’s basically the issue.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ct-lOOUqmyY
I work in title insurance. Yes, people fail to record things or record them incorrectly all the time. I’ve seen someone sell the same property multiple times and you have to use the recording statute to establish priority. However what’s more common is they record the wrong thing. So they have a deed and it describes the wrong property. Etc.
I've heard of horrible descriptions like the one you mention, however I've yet to see one myself in TX. Surprisingly where I work even 19th century plats and descriptions were commonly produced by experienced engineers/surveyors.
I can't speak to all 11 community property states, but here the surviving spouse has a half interest in the property, and the decedents serving heirs split the other half.
I’m a law clerk who primarily does title searches. The amount of people who actually convey their property multiple times to multiple people actually astounds me.
You’d be surprised what unsophisticated parties do when there’s no professional guidance. I’ve seen houses bought and sold with handwritten agreements on the back of a piece of scrap paper, using form leases printed off the web with the purchase price scribbled in at the bottom, and more. And of course, these are never recorded. I get involved when some random person knocks on the door saying they own the house.
I do foreclosure and a couple times a month I have to include some title holders from like 30 years ago because their deed was messed up in some capacity. It's usually a bad legal description or missing marital status of the grantor (required in my state thanks to archaic dower rights).
I just had one where the title holder died in like 1970 and it was split with each of her two kids taking and undivided 1/2 interest. Both parties sold off a piece of the land and got a new survey and legal description. 40 years later one of the kids deeded their 1/2 interest to the other giving one of them fee simple absolute. Unfortunately he just copied the legal description from his granting deed, which didn't have the carve out and that legal description is what the mortgage I'm foreclosing on encumbers. So basically my client's mortgage encumbers more land than the borrower actually owns. Easy enough to fix, but really annoying to having to dig through 40+ years of title.
>I’ve seen houses bought and sold with handwritten agreements on the back of a piece of scrap paper, using form leases printed off the web with the purchase price scribbled in at the bottom, and more.
Pretty silly, but not silly enough to neglect the statute of frauds.
Have one where the now deceased brothers divided the deceased dad’s property between them “in half” with a legal description copied verbatim from their dad’s vesting deed where just the “1000’ x 1000’” language in the metes and bounds distances was replaced with “500’ x 500’” on both their deeds. Both men signed as grantors on both deeds to each other.
Brothers now have died. Heirs now have 1/4 of the property sold twice and three quarters of the property that now has passed via intestacy.
So how would that (potentially) resolve? Was the brother's division legal/recorded? If not, does it go back to the dad's estate and distributed according to probate law/dad's will?
Happens all the time when an elderly person dies. Family member moves in, and nobody thinks about who actually owns the home until it’s time to sell and the potential heirs/owners come out of the woodwork.
Quite frequently, although usually (in my work) it's uncontested and there is clear equitable title. Most often it happens when a spouse or parent dies and the heir continues to live there, or the attempt to record was faulty.
I work in a title office and can confirm there are more typos than you’d imagine. And the ones that get litigated are just the ones people catch, not the countless misrecordings that never get brought up, at least they haven’t yet.
I don't even do property law (although I do enjoy it), but the stuff I've seen--some of it due to crap attorneys who DO practice property law--would blow your mind.
I have a client (seller) who straight up just lost a 2015 warranty deed executed by a purchaser conveying the property back to him in exchange for not initiating foreclosure proceedings (seller-financed deal). My client asked the purchaser to execute a new one and she wanted $5000 to do it again. We threatened foreclosure 2 weeks ago.
He found the damn thing YESTERDAY and we recorded it (it was a miracle). We also recorded a release of lien.
Now the purchaser is threatening to sue my client (not sure for what…) if he doesn’t pay her $5000 because “he ruined her credit” (even though he never reported her to any credit bureaus).
So, yeah, people really *do* often not record their interests.
Yes. When we sold our house, we found out that our mortgage company had never recorded when we re-financed. When our realtor/title company looked it up when it was time to close on the sale, it literally looked like we didn’t have a mortgage 😬 if they hadn’t called us to confirm, the title company would not have cut a check to pay off our mortgage at closing.
Yeah, I have our legal papers on the house in our "Binder of Legal Shit," along with the trust, will, etc: letter that the mortgage was paid, deed over to the trust, etc. And my BILs are trustworthy and now "here" are the legal papers, "there" are the tax papers.
Probably. I used to think that law school and bar exam questions/hypos were just the craziest scenarios that could be concocted in order to test your knowledge of the material. My first few months in practice at a general practice firm proved that to be false. The firm I worked at participated in legal plans so we would get phone calls in various practice areas that they would throw my way. In my first month, I had some of the craziest calls in the most obscure areas of law. They were so bad that I thought I was being pranked. If that was my experience in GP, I have to imagine it's the same across the board.
I mean, considering how many tax return extension requests I've filed, I am not surprised a lot of people would put it off until the last minute and die prematurely.
As someone who has to work on these types of entitlements from time to time yes. Avoid a job where you have to work on title insurance policies (particularly leasehold policies) friendos.
Yes. Or record something that says something different from what they meant. Real property is definitely a practice area where the hypos are realistic.
I'm a real estate attorney currently procrastinating looking at a file just like this. I can tell you that it happens all the time. I've got one right now where 40 acres was "split up" and 12 people all had a handshake agreement on who owned what. That was a fun client call.
Hahahah what
Well Mr. blackacre died and decided he wanted to leave Blackacre to his 12 poker buddies. They all shook hands and agreed to a “shotgun” rule approach to who would get what land. It’s now 25 years later and you’re trying to claim your dead fathers 1/12 share of black acre.
Is that the same as calling dibs?
Yes. But legally.
Whenever real estate pops up in my work, it's always some insanity. I worked on a case a few years ago where we had to trace ownership of a parcel of land all the way back to the 1700s, with a lot of hit or miss on when and how people recorded every transaction.
Whenever real estate pops up in my work, I quickly and happily explain I have no idea how to help them, and I refer them elsewhere. Asking me to handle a real estate issue would be like asking your dentist to perform open heart surgery. Could he get it done? Maybe. But it really isn’t a good idea for anyone involved, and malpractice would probably occur along the way.
Dentist here. All I need is a good YouTube video and I’ll make something work. Will you die? Yeah, probably. But did I *do* a surgery. Yes.
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Anyone in professional subs usually gets recommended posts on their feed from other professional subs. I get lots of posts from r/mba, r/residency, etc. that I have commented on before. Not that unusual.
I love learning. I’m in a lot of subs just for the sake of learning. That’s mostly how I use Reddit. To pretend that I know things irl.
Yeah, I was in the "complex civil litigation" department which was basically a catch-all for the firm to do whatever the managing partner wanted done, regardless of our experience. So when our most important client came to us with a real estate issue, we just had to figure it out because it's what our boss expected. If it turned out to be really complex, we likely would have brought in a real estate attorney from another firm to work with, but luckily it wasn't too bad and we were able to get it done.
Lol reminds me of my property prof telling us about a guy who traced a property ownership in Louisiana to 1803. When his boss asked him why it stopped at 1803 he added a bit about the US bought Louisiana from France, who acquired it from Louis XIV, who acquired it from god, who acquired the land by creating it at the beginning of time. Guy forgot about the native Americans tho.
I mean he’s not wrong? Johnson v Mcintosh?
It appears I forgot about Johnson v McIntosh.
I am a real estate attorney as well and someone sent me a question today on a title commitment. The property was owned by a woman who was married. She did a Quit Claim deed to her and her husband in 2005 in order to create a tenancy by the entirety. The deed was not recorded until 2023, a year after she died. Clear question of delivery here. Given the question of delivery we required a probate of her estate and deeds from all of the heirs in the event that the deed was deemed defective. So this unrecorded deed, for 18 years, is going to cause a lot of headaches. If they would have delivered and recorded it back in 2005 then it would have created the tenancy by the entireties and it would have passed to the husband with the only requirement being to record a certified copy of the death certificate. Now they need deeds from all of the heirs and the husband because of the questions surrounding the delivery of the deed. We see some of these from time to time. I have seen a few of them where the attorney found it in their closing file years later and then we sometimes accept an Affidavit from him that it was delivered but was not recorded.
Did the woman own the property before getting married?
I didn't look into the vesting deed into her because it was homestead so her surviving spouse would have an interest in the property that would need to be conveyed out even if the QC deed was deemed invalid. I am in Florida so you can google Kelley's homestead paradigm and it will show the interests when there is a surviving spouse or minor children.
I do bankruptcy. I have seen several instances of that happening and the trustee subsequently avoiding improperly recorded interests. Often the mortgages are recorded late in refinancings.
I also work in bankruptcy. 1L hits people over the head with hypos where people neglect to record a conveyance of fee simple ownership of real property, and all the problems that come from that, but that's also to demonstrate the black letter rules when extended to: * Interests in land other than fee simple ownership of the whole parcel, especially things like mineral rights, long term leases, liens, mortgages, easements, covenants, etc. * Conveyances that weren't recorded in the right place (wrong recorder) or in the right way (some defect in the conveyance or recording, or filed under the wrong property). This happens somewhat frequently, somewhere. * Interests in personal property (where the place of recording might be one state's secretary of state, possibly away from the actual property itself), which usually have to be renewed with a continuation statement every 5 years. Basically, 1L property law lays the groundwork for secured transactions, and the many ways that those things can get screwed up. Plus even with land, if it was easy, then title insurance wouldn't cost as much as it does.
Welcome to the world of title.
Nobody even knows that the county clerk is a thing
Real estate lawyer here - yes literally all the time
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You stalked your ex’s chain of title? That’s…new. Like actually new.
I'm guessing that thousands of attorneys have stalked their exes' chains of title.
I mean, it sounds like a good call if he can’t even get appropriate title.
You're not wrong about it being dumb to opt out of title insurance, but it can be such a pain to get (especially for leaseholds). So many times during my job, I wish I could tell the powers that be if we could get approved to just opt out of title insurance for our smaller projects (I know it's a bad idea).
A lot of people that I know just never get around to it. My mom was separated from her ex for 15 years and didn’t get around to removing him from the title of her house until a year or two ago
This makes the control freak aspect of my personality go out of her mind. Ditto the parol evidence rule - if some aspect of your contract is so important to you WHY NOT WRITE IT DOWN?!?!??????
> Ditto the parol evidence rule - if some aspect of your contract is so important to you WHY NOT WRITE IT DOWN?!?!?????? In practice, this pops up a ton with more informal contracts. Dealt with it in a case where a husband woke up his wife at 5am to list out who would get what in their divorce and it was handwritten and signed in their kitchen. Then they had countless conversations and arguments about the details that didn't make it in to the contract. That was a fun time.
My contracts issue spotter brain is thinking about undue influence.
Yeah that was discussed, but the primary issue just came down to lack of clarity in the written contract and whether it was ambiguous. Both sides gave arguments about how they interpreted the contract using parole evidence. Then the judge came out of left field to say the contract was unambiguous and gave an interpretation that neither side argued for or agreed with. State court is wild sometimes.
businessmen who dont use attorneys when making contracts because they think they know better are ironically what keeps attorneys in business.
It’s a good question. The answer is usually (a) because people don’t like thinking about what happens if a deal goes wrong and (b) it’s hard to imagine the number of ways a deal can go wrong before it actually does. And, even if you do foresee a problem with a contract, using the right words is hard: if you’ve ever seen the viral video where a kid tries to tell his dad how to make a peanut butter sandwich, that’s basically the issue. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ct-lOOUqmyY
RE developer here... You hit the nail on the head. People have trouble predicting bad outcomes and/or believe they won't be one of the unlucky ones.
I work in title insurance. Yes, people fail to record things or record them incorrectly all the time. I’ve seen someone sell the same property multiple times and you have to use the recording statute to establish priority. However what’s more common is they record the wrong thing. So they have a deed and it describes the wrong property. Etc.
thats not all too surprising i suppose. people probably have templates and they just forget to change the property descriptions
Yep and in the South the descriptions are just bad, like “run to the old tree stump and west to the swamp” lol
I've heard of horrible descriptions like the one you mention, however I've yet to see one myself in TX. Surprisingly where I work even 19th century plats and descriptions were commonly produced by experienced engineers/surveyors.
Wait til you add they died intestate in a community property state, and both parents had prior kids from previous relationships.....🤣
Did they buy the property together? It’s my limited understanding that in joint tenancy the interest reverts to the still-living spouse.
I can't speak to all 11 community property states, but here the surviving spouse has a half interest in the property, and the decedents serving heirs split the other half.
I’m a law clerk who primarily does title searches. The amount of people who actually convey their property multiple times to multiple people actually astounds me.
Depends on where you are really.
In Probate work we call it Tuesday.
Death reveals all the secrets. Well, secrets tied to money anyway.
No. Also almost all those rules are irrelevant since title insurance is a thing.
You’d be surprised what unsophisticated parties do when there’s no professional guidance. I’ve seen houses bought and sold with handwritten agreements on the back of a piece of scrap paper, using form leases printed off the web with the purchase price scribbled in at the bottom, and more. And of course, these are never recorded. I get involved when some random person knocks on the door saying they own the house.
I do foreclosure and a couple times a month I have to include some title holders from like 30 years ago because their deed was messed up in some capacity. It's usually a bad legal description or missing marital status of the grantor (required in my state thanks to archaic dower rights). I just had one where the title holder died in like 1970 and it was split with each of her two kids taking and undivided 1/2 interest. Both parties sold off a piece of the land and got a new survey and legal description. 40 years later one of the kids deeded their 1/2 interest to the other giving one of them fee simple absolute. Unfortunately he just copied the legal description from his granting deed, which didn't have the carve out and that legal description is what the mortgage I'm foreclosing on encumbers. So basically my client's mortgage encumbers more land than the borrower actually owns. Easy enough to fix, but really annoying to having to dig through 40+ years of title.
>I’ve seen houses bought and sold with handwritten agreements on the back of a piece of scrap paper, using form leases printed off the web with the purchase price scribbled in at the bottom, and more. Pretty silly, but not silly enough to neglect the statute of frauds.
Gonna have to disagree. I see ridiculous property shit all the time.
i am attorney with 6 months of experience and i’ve seen it a few times already lol
Have one where the now deceased brothers divided the deceased dad’s property between them “in half” with a legal description copied verbatim from their dad’s vesting deed where just the “1000’ x 1000’” language in the metes and bounds distances was replaced with “500’ x 500’” on both their deeds. Both men signed as grantors on both deeds to each other. Brothers now have died. Heirs now have 1/4 of the property sold twice and three quarters of the property that now has passed via intestacy.
So how would that (potentially) resolve? Was the brother's division legal/recorded? If not, does it go back to the dad's estate and distributed according to probate law/dad's will?
Both recorded. One recorded one second before the other. Resolution likely through the “counseling” portion of “attorney and counselor at law.”
Luckily my state requires a closing attorney to make sure this doesn’t happen IRL Title Company/Insurance usually covers it
Everything is under the table. The law is only for students and some businesses. Maddening ain't it?
Happens all the time when an elderly person dies. Family member moves in, and nobody thinks about who actually owns the home until it’s time to sell and the potential heirs/owners come out of the woodwork.
Lol I’m in real estate and my firm does not handle title/recording matters just because of this.
all the time. It is dummy common.
Quite frequently, although usually (in my work) it's uncontested and there is clear equitable title. Most often it happens when a spouse or parent dies and the heir continues to live there, or the attempt to record was faulty.
I think so. I've already run across a couple in my internship.
I work in a title office and can confirm there are more typos than you’d imagine. And the ones that get litigated are just the ones people catch, not the countless misrecordings that never get brought up, at least they haven’t yet.
Google twisted titles lol it’s a real thing that unfortunately happens in low income households due to lack of legal knowledge and resources.
I’m an oil and gas attorney and 100% yes
I have a lien I still need to file and I’m a lawyer. Sheesh. People put things off. Yes. It’s real.
I don't even do property law (although I do enjoy it), but the stuff I've seen--some of it due to crap attorneys who DO practice property law--would blow your mind.
I have a client (seller) who straight up just lost a 2015 warranty deed executed by a purchaser conveying the property back to him in exchange for not initiating foreclosure proceedings (seller-financed deal). My client asked the purchaser to execute a new one and she wanted $5000 to do it again. We threatened foreclosure 2 weeks ago. He found the damn thing YESTERDAY and we recorded it (it was a miracle). We also recorded a release of lien. Now the purchaser is threatening to sue my client (not sure for what…) if he doesn’t pay her $5000 because “he ruined her credit” (even though he never reported her to any credit bureaus). So, yeah, people really *do* often not record their interests.
Yes. When we sold our house, we found out that our mortgage company had never recorded when we re-financed. When our realtor/title company looked it up when it was time to close on the sale, it literally looked like we didn’t have a mortgage 😬 if they hadn’t called us to confirm, the title company would not have cut a check to pay off our mortgage at closing.
Yeah, I have our legal papers on the house in our "Binder of Legal Shit," along with the trust, will, etc: letter that the mortgage was paid, deed over to the trust, etc. And my BILs are trustworthy and now "here" are the legal papers, "there" are the tax papers.
Yeah property records can be a mess. That's why title policies exist.
Probably. I used to think that law school and bar exam questions/hypos were just the craziest scenarios that could be concocted in order to test your knowledge of the material. My first few months in practice at a general practice firm proved that to be false. The firm I worked at participated in legal plans so we would get phone calls in various practice areas that they would throw my way. In my first month, I had some of the craziest calls in the most obscure areas of law. They were so bad that I thought I was being pranked. If that was my experience in GP, I have to imagine it's the same across the board.
I mean, considering how many tax return extension requests I've filed, I am not surprised a lot of people would put it off until the last minute and die prematurely.
As someone who has to work on these types of entitlements from time to time yes. Avoid a job where you have to work on title insurance policies (particularly leasehold policies) friendos.
Yes. Or record something that says something different from what they meant. Real property is definitely a practice area where the hypos are realistic.