As part of our mortage brokerage, we have a broker-owned escrow company through LandAmerica and Virtual Escrow. If any of you have looked into this before, we highly recommend it!

Besides the flexibility and income that Virtual Escrow provides, it also means that we end up learning a lot about title and escrow that we wouldn't have known before. Take the following story as an example:

One of our California clients received a house as a gift from his grandmother. They filed what they thought were the appropriate forms with the county to avoid reassessment of property taxes due to the transfer having taken place between family. When the client's tax payments shot up, he came to us asking if we could help figure out what had happened.

We learned two important things: 1 - reassessment of property taxes after a transfer of a property between grandparents and grandchildren will take place if the child's parents are not deceased. Since our client's mother was still alive, the property got reassessed.

That's not the end of the story, though, it gets much better!

2 - grant deeds can be corrected! Although the transfer from the grandparent to the grandchild took place two years ago, he is able to file a correcting deed with the county to change the transfer from the grandmother to the mother, then on to the child --- resulting in a re-reassessment of taxes and *hopefully soon* a refund check from the county.

Who knew?

Cyara Pott - Market Specialist

P.S. Finding all this out required several communications with the county and with a trusted title officer, and we are not guaranteeing that this will be applicable in all cases. What worked in this case may not work with everyone so we advise you do your own research on the topic.