Legal Question in Real Estate Law in West Virginia

Re: Real Estate Disbute

Unfortunately this is a West Virginia question and I am not licensed in that state and I am not familiar with the laws of that state. If the property were in Virginia the scenario would be following. The deed that you have.... you said that it is a copy: does it have signatures on it? if so you might be able to prove that the signature matches the one of the current owner. A Deed is valid between the parties even if it is not put on record.... the problems arise when there is another bona fide purchaser who comes into the picture. When a third party (who does not know anything about an underlying dispute or a past conveyance) purchases a piece of real estate with consideration, then this person is an innocent one who cannot suffer damages because of a prior unrecorded transfer. So the bottom line is this: you should file a notice of lis pendens. This will alert potential buyers that there is an underlying dispute and the owner cannot sell this property without resolving the dispute. Of course you need to file suit right away to quiet title. Things are a lot different if you do not have signatures on that copy of the deed... you would have to prove that all of the money that the deceased paid were indeed installments for the purchase price, payments on a note and deed of trust or something similar. Also, another possibility is that the parties executed a "contract for deed". This means that the parties signed a contract under which the future owner makes payments for a certain amount of time to the owner with the idea that eventually the owner will record the deed when all payments are made. Unfortunately contracts for deed fail very often because of the strict terms of the contract whereby if the future owner fails to payments then the whole transaction is considered a lease and the final deed never gets recorded. Normally contracts for deed are done by attorneys (or title companies) and the original signed deed is entrusted to the attorney who will at some point record it: the orginal owner would not have the original deed to record. I think that you need to find out a lot more about the underlying transaction. No matter what you need to act quickly. You really need to contact a West Virginia Attorney to make sure that the above applies.

Sincerely,