Legal Question in Wills and Trusts in California

Without having a review of the trust which holds the properties, suggest you seek a competent estate planning attorney to assist you in the transfers, and also assess whether the trust owes any taxes on any gains in the properties that would be due upon transfers.

oy vey, I hope you have at least filed the Claims for Exemption from Reassessment.

The Trustee needs to execute Deeds (with change of ownership reports, and exemption claims, if the latter are not already filed- these are judicial counsel forms and can be found online. I think all the recorder and assessor's offices have websites by now) to the beneficiaries and record the deeds at the County Recorder's office. There are also other duties and responsibilities of a successor trustee, but if you and your brother are the only two beneficiaries of the trust, and are in agreement about everything, you may be able to skip some but not all of the formalities. I'd advise you to consult an attorney and wrap up the trust administration process asap; it is unlikely that your parents' trust contemplated leaving the properties titled in the trust for this long.

Deeds.

Preliminary Change of Ownership Forms

Parent Child exempton claim forms

A proper documentary trasnfer tax exemption logo

It is advisable to consider a title report or title policy ( or an endorsement of the existing policy)

I would strongly advise engaging counsel to help with these steps and providing the needed accounting and final distribution steps for the trust.

It is way to easy to do these things incorrectly, and expensive to try to fix them after the fact. As noted in a prior response, you may already have problems if the required claim for parent child exemption was not processed. The result could be retroactive reassessment of the property taxes on each property.