Legal Question in Real Estate Law in California

Re: quick deed

First, when you say you "quick deeded" property, I assume you mean you transferred your ownership interest in it by quitclaim deed. There is no such thing as a "quick claim" or "quick deed;" the correct term is quitclaim. A quitclaim deed is one of the two main kinds of deed used to transfer ownership of real property. The other main kind is the grant deed. The main difference between the two is that if you give someone a gran deed you are giving the buyer a warranty that you owned the property interest being transferred by the deed, whereas with a quitclaim deed you don't guarantee anything, you merely "quit" your claim, if any, to ownership in favor of the other party.

Your facts do not make any mention of what you received in exchange for deeding your property to your partner's mom. Did you sell it or give it away? Why? There is something important here you haven't told us.

In any event, after you delivered the deed, the property wasn't yours any more. It became you partner's mom's property. This would be true whether the buyer or donee recorded the deed or not. Recording has nothing to do with transferring ownership. It has only to do with giving notice of the change of ownership to outsiders like your lender, the tax collector, and persons who might refinance or give second mortgages.

Once your partner's mom became owner, there was nothing to prevent her taking out a second mortgage. I'm a bit surprised that a lender would give a second mortgage to the owner of an unrecorded ownership interest, but maybe that indeed happened (?).

You made a big mistake by disposing of your first mortgage lender's collateral without paying off the first mortgage, or even notifying your lender.

In may opinion, there is much more to the story here than you're sharing with LawGuru. Further, I'm of the opinion that you have no case against your partner's mom.

I would add, without knowing whether the comment is appropriate here, that transferring property to friends or family by gift or at a too-low price is fraudulent if the purpose or effect is to make it more difficult for creditors to collect debts.

Re: quick deed

You can sue the bad guys, but do they have money and assets to collect against if you get a judgment? If so, and if serious about doing this, and if this is in SoCal courts, feel free to contact me.

Re: quick deed

You can sue the bad guys, but do they have money and assets to collect against if you get a judgment? If so, and if serious about doing this, and if this is in SoCal courts, feel free to contact me.