Property transfers
The house has to move, and the tax bill is watching.
Real property sits at the center of most estates. The transfer raises reassessment questions that are far easier to answer before the deed than after it.
In short
Deeds, retitling and the reassessment questions that follow a change in ownership of California real property.
Every transfer of California real property is a change in ownership question before it is anything else. Some changes trigger a reassessment of the property's taxable value and some are excluded from it, and the difference is measured in thousands of dollars a year for as long as the property is held.
We prepare and record the deeds, and we work out the reassessment consequence first rather than discovering it on the next tax bill.
What this covers
Four things we do here
Deeds and retitling
The recorded document is the transfer. Everything else is a description of one.
Parent to child exclusion
The exclusion still exists, and it is narrower than most people remember.
Putting real property in a trust
The single most commonly skipped step in an estate plan, and the most expensive one to skip.
Out of state property
A cabin in Oregon does not answer to a California trust unless somebody made it.
Read about this
Four questions we are asked about property transfers
- Can a California trust hold property in another state?Yes, but only once a deed valid in that state has been recorded there. A California trust does not reach across a state line on its own.
- What kind of deed do I need to transfer California property?The recorded document is the transfer. Which form it takes, and what it says on its face, decides both what passes and how the assessor treats it.
- Can I still transfer my house to my child without a property tax increase?Sometimes, and the rules are considerably narrower than they were. What most people remember about this exclusion is the old version of it.
- Does putting my house in a trust reassess my property taxes?No. Transferring your own home into your own revocable trust is not a change in ownership, so it carries no property tax consequence at all.
Who does this work
Elsewhere
The other practice areas
- Estate planningThe documents that decide who acts for you and who receives what, written to be used rather than filed.
- Trust administrationWhat happens after. The notices, valuations, transfers and accountings a successor trustee is required to produce.
- ProbateThe court proceeding that moves property when there was no trust, or when the trust did not own it.
- Business successionWhere the estate plan meets the operating agreement, and the two have to be made to agree.
- Incapacity and special needsWho decides when you cannot, and how to provide for someone whose benefits an outright gift would put at risk.