Legal Question in Real Estate Law in California

Re: QuitClaim Deed

I assume you have purchased a pre-printed quitclaim deed form on line or from a stationery store. The one-word answer to how you fill it out is "carefully." Beyond that, advising you would really require a lawyer to read the form, determine your intentions as grantor and grantee (i.e., is the conveyance to be of a part interest or whatever the grantor holds?), your status (single or married), and to obtain an accurate legal description of the property.

There are other details to be handled as well, including notarization and recording, checking the proper boxes or writing in the reasons, if any, why the transfer is exempt from tax, and the like.

Another aspect that should be looked at by a lawyer is whether the transfer makes sense for the parties in the first place. I'd say that in at least 50% of the informal transfers of title I get asked about, the parties, or one or the other of them, is making a HUGE mistake by participating in the transaction. Just to mention a few of the blunders, I would mention (1) making a gift the donor later regrets when the relationship goes sour; (2) being hit with a property-tax reassessment; (3) making a fraudulent transfer to hide property from creditors, which when discovered has very bad results for both parties to the deal; (4) setting up a gift-tax or capital-gains tax liability which could have been avoided through better estate planning; (5) triggering a due-on-sale clause in a deed of trust; and on and on.

We also see people who write their own legal instruments making mistakes such as inaccurate or incomplete legal descriptions of the property, or inadvertently allowing property to be titled so as to raise an incorrect presumption of community property.

So, the bottom line is that maybe you should consult with an attorney as to your purposes as well as technique.