How to hold title in California

How a buyer takes title is a vesting choice. It changes who can sign later, whether a death avoids probate, and what the tax basis looks like. It does not change the price. Team Goeglein does not pick the vesting. An attorney or a CPA does. Title's job is to make the deed, the order, and the policy say the same thing the parties decided.

The options these articles come back to are the ones on the vesting guide: sole ownership, a married person as sole and separate property, community property, community property with right of survivorship, joint tenancy, tenancy in common, a revocable living trust, and an entity such as an LLC. Each one is a different answer to survivorship and to who signs. The side-by-side comparison lives at how to hold title in California, linked below, and the posts in this category take one of those paths and stay on it.

A trust article is about the deed into or out of the trust, the certification title asks for when the property sells, and the fact that a transfer which does not change who benefits is treated differently from a sale. A probate article is about the court authority that has to exist before title can insure the transfer. An entity article is about the operating agreement or the resolution that names the signer. None of those is a suggestion to pick a vesting for the tax result. That advice is not a title company's to give.

Read these if you are an agent writing an offer, an escrow officer looking at a vested owner that does not match the contract, or a buyer who has been handed a deed and wants the words defined before calling a lawyer. If the property is in a South Bay or Westside escrow, the order pages are how the file gets opened so the prelim can show the vested owner while there is still time to fix a mismatch.