Legal Question in Real Estate Law in California

You should have checked the details yourself, and should have read the title company's paperwork at the time, not four years later. You are passed the three year statute of limitation on any case of fraud, and probably passed the four year statute for breach of contract type claims on the sellers and brokers. You could make a claim on the title company if they had made a mistake, but it sounds like you simply didn't read their disclosures of the true facts.

I would look high and low for the cause of this discrepancy before filing a suit or claim (unless necessary to protect a statute of limitations). It MAY have resulted from a mistake, but there is also a significant possibility that the change resulted from another cause. Let me give you a few examples to highlight the great range of reasons why this might happen.

The first is that in many places postal addresses differ from political boundary based addresses. Not far down the road from me are ranches that are two or three miles from the village of Tomales and in Marin County, as is Tomales. However, the Tomales post office has no letter carriers or trucks, but there is an RFD delivery truck out of Petaluma, which is 17 miles away in Sonoma County, that goes right by these ranches. Most of the ranchers would rather not go into the Tomales P.O. every day to pick up mail from a box they would have to pay to rent, so they voluntarily elect to have Petaluma mailing addresses even though that seemingly puts them in another county. Something like this may be going on in your community too; I think postal addresses are a poor and unreliable indicator of where you are for tax-paying and voting purposes.

Another possible reason is that your property may have been in an unincorporated part of X County at one time, with local choice and custom being to receive mail through addresses using the name of nearby Ritzyville. Then, Poortown, on the other hillside, annexes the unincorporated territory, making it part of Poortown, an incorporated past of County X.

A third possibility, not too different, is from real life. A client lived in an unincorporated part of Contra Costa County and had a Walnut Creek address, although not in Walnut Creek. The post office built a new P.O. in nearby Alamo, a more upscale town, I'm told. Although the client and her neighbors were still in the unincorporated part of the county, and not part of either Walnut Creek or Alamo, they successfully convinced the U.S.P.S. to re-arrange their delivery routes to serve their homes from the newly-expanded Alamo post office, and happily adopted the ritzier address.

So, if you are in, or were in, an unincorporated area, the address-change could have occurred without anyone really making a paperwork error. And for every example I cited, there are perhaps a dozen that I don't know about.

Finally, it is indeed possible that there was a fraud here, but don't overlook the possibility that the address issue has "natural causes."

So the criminals actually stop at the city limits sign in your neighborhood? Fascinating...