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How a Title and Escrow Background Saved the Day as a Sacramento Realtor
Having a title and escrow background as a Sacramento Realtor is often very helpful for my clients. That acquired knowledge tends to come in handy at the most opportune times. It’s not just the experience; it’s having worked in those industries before technology was available. Provides for a much deeper understanding in some ways. Even today, I could go to the courthouse and search title on property all the way back to the U.S. patent without touching a computer. I can draw legal metes and bounds descriptions. Not to mention explain debits and credits on a closing statement. The basics never go away.
Before I became a crazy successful real estate broker, I worked in title insurance in the early ’70s at First American Title in Denver and Boulder. Later, when I moved to Newport Beach in 1976, I went into escrow at Stewart Title, eventually earning the status of Certified Escrow Officer. Having a title and escrow background catapulted my career in real estate. As a Sacramento Realtor today, I still draw on those experiences.
Here is an example. A few days ago, I received a preliminary title report. I always review my prelims to make sure there are no surprises. Sometimes I find a peculiar item I did not expect. If I see a Statement of Information required from one of the parties, for example, and the surnames are uncommon, uh-oh, that’s a big red flag for a file. I look at the easements, compare them to the plat map, among other items in the prelim. It’s even more important for buyer’s agents to review prelims, but few probably do.
The prelim I received on Monday just about gave me a heart attack. At first, I noticed the vesting was not fully explained. It showed an individual and a trust being in title. Well, I happen to know a few things about trusts since I work with a lot of Successor Trustees as sellers. For example, one can’t use a power of attorney in a trust. Another is you cannot hold title as joint tenants between an individual and a trust.
I contacted the escrow officer to try to determine if there was a problem. She said yes, the parties held title as tenants in common. That’s certainly what it looked like to me, now that she mentioned it. Due to that oddity, one of the parties, a deceased person, hopefully did not die intestate, but the estate would need to be probated. And we are in escrow. Under a deadline to quickly close. Including the funding of a down payment assistance program from Guild Mortgage that goes away on June 15. Probate can take quite a few months to get through court. Oh, Mamma Mia!
When I relayed that information to the seller, he almost had a heart attack, too. See, the Realist showed the seller’s mother’s trust as in title. Nothing about his father. Except for a grant deed in the early 1970s, holding title as joint tenants. Sometimes, Realist data is wrong. In fact, sometimes escrow officers are wrong. Then I paused. Wait a minute, I don’t see any other deeds recorded. I read through the prelim again. Yes, there was an action call for an affidavit of death of joint tenant in the Exceptions. Aha! It suddenly made sense to me. All the pieces fell into place. The escrow officer was mistaken.
Escrow was closed by that hour, but my title and escrow background helped me as a Sacramento Realtor to put two and two together. I called the seller and assured him we were OK. Did not want him to end up sleepless that night thinking the entire escrow would blow up and he’d have to spend thousands to go through probate. What I figured out had happened was the two parties indeed held title as joint tenants. Then the husband died, prior to the date of the trust. They just never produced the death certificate nor recorded an affidavit of death of joint tenant. Which is OK because it can be done by the Successor Trustee at closing.
The surviving spouse later created a living trust and put the house into it, making her son the Successor Trustee. Recovering from his pounding heart, the seller asked if I was certain. Well, I can’t give legal advice, but my gut said 99.9% this is what happened. Sure enough, we confirmed it with the escrow officer after the seller brought in his trust documents yesterday morning, and all is right with the escrow. Huge relief for my seller.
Tips for Selling a Home as a Successor Trustee Under a Trust
Selling a home as a successor trustee is easier if sellers release the trust documents in advance.
It seems like lately I’ve been working with sellers who are selling a home as a successor trustee under a trust. I’d venture to guess that perhaps 30% of my transactions are for sellers who are successor trustees. A successor trustee is an individual named to manage the trust in the event of a death or an inability of the existing trustee to handle the affairs. Apart from the legal end of title, the sale itself is fairly similar to selling anything else, although generally the successor trustee is exempt from certain seller disclosures.
What I have found in working with sellers who are selling real estate as a successor trustee is they are often under a bit of stress and duress. The home might be a family home where parents once lived or maybe even where the successor trustee grew up. It’s bad enough to be grieving and dealing with your own personal issues after a person you love dies, nobody really welcomes the additional stress they think selling a house will cause.
As their Sacramento Realtor, I try to be sensitive to the attachments and emotions of successor trustees. Not only do they need to deal with selling the house as a successor trustee, but often there are beneficiaries of the trust and distributions of assets that can cause all holy hell to break out. People sometimes get very weird dealing with a death in the family, and there is a side that can rear its ugly head when there are emotions and money involved.
I’m not gonna get into all of the infighting I have witnessed over the years with family members struggling for control and ownership, suffice to say it exists and it’s common. I just try to keep the peace between all parties the best I can. One aspect many people don’t realize is they can’t list a property subject to a successor trustee or sign a contract with a power of attorney. They must sign as the successor trustee.
I also ask for a copy of the trust so I can send it to escrow to determine if we have all of the documents that are required. Sometimes there are pages missing or it is unreadable. More often than not, the affidavit of death is missing and needs to be recorded. It’s a good idea to take care of all of those small details before going into escrow to keep the transaction running smoothly for the successor trustee and heirs.
There are plenty of other things for heirs to argue over. They don’t need to be involved in the technical details and we don’t need problems popping up just before closing. A wiser solution is to handle them in advance. If you’re thinking about selling a home as a successor trustee, call Elizabeth Weintraub at 916.233.6759.
The Undead No-Suicide Brother in Minneapolis
For all of my readers who often skim through paragraphs of my Sacramento real estate blog, let me start by clarifying that my brother is undead and did not die by suicide. He may be dying from stage 4 cancer, which was a bit of a shock to me, but he is still alive. The strange thing is I was thinking about him a few days ago while I was out in our 106-degree heat, riding my bicycle around William Land Park and listening to Gram Parsons / Emmy Lou through my Bluebuds. We were pretty inseparable as kids — a year apart. People used to think we were twins.
But then as things sometimes go in families, we drifted apart. It wasn’t a slow separation, my brother just decided at some point during his marriage that he no longer wanted to associate with his parent’s side of the family. Nobody knows why. We exhausted efforts to turn him around. It’s one of those things that one finally accepts that cannot be changed.
Which goes to show it wasn’t a completely odd reaction from me after a pair of detectives appeared yesterday morning on my sister’s doorstep in Minneapolis. I believe they were from the Hennepin County Sheriff’s department. The police told my sister our brother is dead. Committed suicide. Said he jumped off the Ford Bridge over the Mississippi. Since the river divides Minneapolis from Saint Paul, the body had drifted to the Saint Paul side, which was why Ramsey County health authorities or the Saint Paul Police department were also involved in the investigation.
My sister was sobbing. I was in shock. My brother committed suicide? Nobody in our family died by suicide. Although, everybody’s family is dysfunctional in some way.
Now, the Ford Bridge is by 46th Street, which runs near my brother’s home in south Minneapolis. It was conceivable. The detectives said he left his bike and guitar on the bridge. I could see that. My husband found a website set up for donations to help with my brother’s medical bills, but the funding had been cut off a few weeks ago. That’s how we found out he was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer. A phone number at the bottom belonged to a woman. I called, she answered; I mentioned that she had my maiden name so we were probably related.
The woman appeared a bit annoyed and impatient. I tried to be calm and sensitive. Turns out she is my brother’s son’s wife. I asked if she was sitting down because I didn’t know if she was driving or what. I did not correct her, btw, when she said my brother has 4 sisters, which he does not. I quietly shared the news I had received about his death. She choked. Then hammered me for details. Promised to call me back after she spoke to her mother-in-law. But she never called. She must have found out immediately after my call that my brother was undead, but she didn’t tell me.
Later in the day, my sister called to say she had finally reached my sister-in-law and, surprise, my brother was sitting right there. Undead. He was now the no-suicide brother. The police had mixed him up with some other bridge jumper. How bizarre is that? You can’t trust the police when they show up on your doorstep to deliver the news a relative has died? All that emotional upheaval. Of course, it doesn’t change the fact my brother is still dying, probably very soon.
My sister asked if she could see our brother. It doesn’t look like that will happen.
It seemed appropriate to watch another episode of Fargo, the TV series. Just wait until his family starts searching online for an Affidavit of Death.
Humor in Dying and the Affidavit of Death
You never know who you will touch with your words when you write online, but you can bet it will probably be a person who is alive. An agent in my office yesterday asked how I can be “everywhere online,” and he asked if I spend a lot of time in front of the computer. Not really. I write a blog every day about what I do as a Sacramento real estate agent. I’ve written other articles online that stay there and continue to be read by people day after day and year after year. Like I reminded the agent in my office yesterday, I was sitting on top of a desk talking to him. I was not at my computer.
That’s the beauty of writing online. People will read articles long after they are written. I also write a homebuying newsletter that I send out every week to my subscriber base. I can’t tell you how many people subscribe to it because it’s confidential information that About.com won’t let me divulge, but let’s just say it’s a good thing I don’t have to maintain nor update that database of subscribers.
I often highlight a new article I’ve written in my newsletter. Most of the time, I never hear anything from anybody, but the article I wrote about an Affidavit of Death generated a lot of emails (positive, thank goodness). First, I must admit that it is a humor piece. It starts out pretty serious, and then it heads into a different direction, one that I hope tickles. It might take you a little while to figure out that it is one huge parody. Real estate agents in particular find it amusing. It was a real estate agent who initially asked me about an Affidavit of Death as a marketing tool and prompted the article.
I’ve had people ask if the agent who initially wrote to me had responded to this article, and yes, she did. She changed her mind after reading it, apparently. Another agent wrote yesterday to say she received my newsletter while she was in the hospital with her husband. He died a few hours later. Right when she was sitting there reading my Affidavit of Death article! . . . and laughing. She thanked me for it. I guess humor helps. See, it’s stuff like this that makes my day.
It also reminds me that no matter how bad a situation might seem, there is generally an upside to it somewhere.
A Sacramento Agent is Not Always Sitting Behind Her Desk
The last few days have been so weird in Sacramento real estate. I’ve got sellers saying they don’t know if they should accept an offer, even though most of their two-dozen offers are more than list price, and I’ve got buyers on other transactions saying they don’t know if they want to close. Why, it’s enough to want to make a Sacramento agent want to write an article about an Affidavit of Death. OK, I couldn’t help it, but I hope you like that link. 🙂
It would be easier if the next time I decide to plan in advance for months and months a vacation somewhere wild if I would just move the date up just one day early. Then, everybody would think I was leaving on, say, a Monday, instead of a Tuesday, which would give me one whole extra day to take care of last-minute problems that have a way of being very last-minute, up to the point of when I’m boarding the freakin’ plane.
It’s enough to give a normal Sacramento agent a heart attack. But no heart attacks for me. When I go, it will be something much more horrendous. I was lounging about at the doctor’s office yesterday in my underwear, waiting for almost 40 minutes on the examining table before the doctor popped her head in the door. We just have to do a little biopsy, she says. Nurse, oh, nurse, where is my razor blade? I can’t do a a biopsy without a razor blade. Flipping her gloved fingertips in the air. Twirling. Waiting.
Conditions aren’t always quite so comforting while I’m lying on my back and trying to answer emails on my cellphone. Doctor sticking a numbing needle in my stomach. Ouch. Slicing off pieces of skin with razor-sharp, um, razors (who knew?). What is astounding to me is when clients sometimes say my emails are too short. They have no idea what this Sacramento agent is actually doing while I’m attempting to respond quickly to their concerns. People who know me are groaning. People who don’t are wondering what I’m talking about.
No matter what, I still try to give first-class service to my clients. I have systems in place, team members from the Elizabeth Weintraub Team who will jump in to help, and even then, I have a really hard time going on vacation. I don’t want anybody to think I have abandoned them, because I haven’t. Not really. Not ever, if I can help it.
