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President's Corner
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Joe Crutchfield
CEO Investors Title Company
(314) 862-0303
jcrutchfield@investors-title.com
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I hope everyone's Spring is going well and your business is blooming (get it, "blooming" like flowers, instead of booming?)
Anyway.....I will get back to the drawing board for my humor next time, but I wanted to talk this month about an issue that I have seen quite often lately.
That issue is sellers not really understanding all of the liens that affect their property, resulting in them being short of money on the deal. (Which is not a good problem to have by the way) In all of these deals either the sellers were divorced or deceased. Both such scenarios are "higher risk", in my opinion, of having different types of contract and title related issues.
For example, one deal involved a recently divorced couple who had 2 deeds of trust on their property, which was fine because they knew about these and there was enough money to pay off both of the loans. When the title was run a judgment in excess of $500,000 was discovered against both ex-spouses that would have been found if title had been checked prior to the sales contract. The judgment had to do with a business loan that was personally guaranteed by the two spouses which is why I am sure they did not think of it.
Another example involved a deceased owner and a contract signed by an individual who proclaimed to his agent he was "the only heir so don't worry about it" (FYI, when someone says "...don't worry about it...", worry about it!) Anyway, we ran title and, of course, discovered that there was another person that the deceased owned had placed on title with her prior to her death, which of course would have been seen on a pre-contract title search. Not something a client wants to hear.
Of course, there is good news and bad news. The good news? As a result of the efforts of our outstanding staff and clients, both of these deals did close. The bad news? They almost didn't close and there was a lot of frustration, grief and finger pointing that could have been avoided if titles had been run at the time the listing was taken. The agents/sellers would have at least gotten a head start on the judgment and additional owner instead of scrambling to solve the problem with closing dates looming.
So those are my stories for now (and I'm sticking to them). Hopefully they are instructive and interesting for you. Finally, if you have been complaining about all the rain we have been getting, remember, summer will be here before we know it and we can all complain about the heat.
Joe
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