Legal Question in Real Estate Law in California

Re: power of attorney for sale of real estate

No, the legal description is a technical description that specifically identifies your property. It almost always refers to a specific parcel number found on a specific page within a specified volume of a book of maps.

A title company can probably get yours for you for little or no charge. If not, you might try to the office of the county recorder.

Re: power of attorney for sale of real estate

The legal description is what defines a particular piece of turf in a way that it cannot be mistaken for any other piece of turf on the face of the earth. A proper legal description is essential to an effective transfer of real estate. If there can be any boubt as to what property is being conveyed, the attempted conveyance may fail.

There are several kinds of legal descriptions in common use. One is based on metes and bounds, and makes reference to township and range numbers, terms like "the Northwest 1/4 of the Southeast 1/4 of Section 7, Township 11 North, Range 6 East, Mt. Diablo Base and Meridian" and distances and bearings such as "North 11 degrees 24 minutes west 224.75 feet" and so forth. This system is more common on larger parcels and those that have not been extensively subdivided.

In cities, lots are much more frequently given legal descriptions referencing a surveyor's map that has been recorded, and they will read something like this: "Lot 11 of Block 37 of the Abercrombie Addition of 1909 to the City of Dandelionville, as recorded March 4, 1010 at Map 23, Book of Maps 15, Official Maps of Yoyo County."

A legal description will often conclude with the assessor parcel number, but neither the APN nor the street address is considered adequate in most cases.

There are isolated cases of a court upholding a deed with a legal description as vague as "All of the Weedpatch Ranch lying southerly of Rattlesnake Creek," but generally such descriptions are inadvisable as being far too unspecific to define the property being conveyed without possibility of dispute.