Legal Question in Real Estate Law in Texas

Re: Radification & Certification

You will need the assistance of an attorney, and you may also need the assistance of a land surveyor.

The first step will be to determine the exact legal description of the property originally owned by your grandmother, and then the exact legal descriptions of the pieces transferred to you and your mother.

Assuming that there is a discrepancy, the deeds to you and your mother may have to be reformed or corrected.

The situation may be complicated by the fact that your grandmother has died, because she is no longer available to execute corrective deeds. If she had a will, you may also have to work with the executor of her estate.

Until an attorney reviews the various deeds and makes a more accurate assessment of the situation, it will be difficult to estimate the attorney's fee. However, most attorneys will not charge you for that initial assessment.

Re: Radification & Certification

This isn't a complicated process, but my suspicion is that not having an attorney prepare the docs is what got us here in the first place, so I would strongly recommend both the use of an attorney and a title company to fix the problem. Since the grantor is deceased, she cannot execute corrective deeds, and there is a question on who is still the titled owner of the property. If the preamble is bad, I need to know how. Is it a defective grant? Grant to someone who doesn't exist? If so, then the estate may still be in title of the property, subject to a will or intestate distribution of the decedent's estate. The amount of mess that an attorney would have to clean up depends on what was filed, how it was incorrect, and how many people the attorney must track down in order to make it right.