I am not assuming anything. I have seen the mistakes that these incompetent scofflaw closing companies make many times in recorded deeds in Dare County, North Carolina. Indeed, the majority of deed chains (they often prepare two deeds when working for the PCC's) from scofflaw closing companies I have seen with my own eyes are invalid to pass title in North Carolina.
If an attorney makes a mistake, when you have remedies against his legal malpractice insurance or by complaining to the State Bar. Good luck with a scofflaw closing company. If your escrow disappears as it did with the John Faeth closing company, also recommended by many on these boards, then in many states the State Bar will have a client security fund to make it good. That did not happen with the victims of John Faeth who were sometimes out thousands of dollars.
If someone from a resort tells you the week is still yours, it will probably be because legally it still is, and then you will have the choice of paying up, or having your credit destroyed. Your choice, just like using a scofflaw closing company is your choice.
Some of the common errors I see on deeds from scofflaw closing companies include:
1) not containing all of the legal requisites for a valid deed in North Carolina
2) using corporate deed templates for individual deeds (this does not always make the deed invalid to pass title but often does)
3) not copying the entire legal description
4) using a legal description from the wrong resort
5) failing to pick up the week and unit number when they are in the body of the deed instead of within the description
6) changing the unit and week number where it appears for convenience but not in the description where it matters from a legal standpoint.
7) using language from another state on joint tenancy. Because of a North Carolina statute and subsequnet Supreme Court case, one has to be VERY specific here or you end up with a tenancy in common instead. This does not invalidate title but it could be very expensive at probate time. An NC attorney in most situations would have solved the problem by creating a tenancy by the entirety instead, which can be done by inserted one word (and it is not ''entirety'') and has the same attributes that most are looking for with a joint tenancy.
One Outer Banks HOA spent thousands of dollars hiring an attorney to try to clean up the deeds at their resort, most of the mess coming from scofflaw timeshare closing companies. Of course, that should have been the expenses of the members in the mess, and not an HOA expense.
Avoiding legal fees can often be a false economy. I remember well one potential client who came in when I was in the private practice of law. To save the ~$200 legal fee at the time for an uncontested divorce, she had copied what someone else had done, prepared her own papers and obtained the divorce. Unfortunately for her, she had a substantial marital property claim agasint her husband for property that was solely in his name, and a divorce decree cuts off that claim unless language is inserted to preserve it. She, of course, did not know to do this and did not include it in the divorce decree she prepared herself. So, to save $200, she shot herself out of the saddle on what would otherwise have been a solid claim for ~$100,000.
Again, no one has given an example of any one having a problem. Your assuming that these
"jackleg" company's are making a mistake and there will be a future problem.
I'm not worried about this at all. An attorney can make a mistake just like
anyone else. As Denise says, it's not on the deed who did the prep. If the state sees an issue with the way things are, they will make a change.
If there is a special assessment after I deeded away the property, I'm not
worried about someone saying it's still mine. Sometimes people worry just to
worry. There's probably less chance of that happening than me winning the
lottery.:rofl:
My father bought a house in Wisconsin about 40 years ago. During the deed
transfer, an error was found in the deed. The error was made by another
attorney 15 years before during another transfer. The error was corrected no
problems.
