The Importance of Recording a Title

Buying real estate, whether as a home or for your business, is always a complicated affair. You need to secure financing, you need to have the premises inspected, you need to negotiate the price, and so on. However, there’s one additional factor you may need to worry about that isn’t always obvious: officially recording the fact that you’ve bought the real estate.

Whenever you purchase real estate, a part of that process is supposed to include recording the transfer of title with the local clerk’s office. This is to make sure there is a consistent record showing the transfer of ownership between one person to another. However, not everyone remembers, or knows, to have their deed recorded, which can potentially lead to a lot of issues down the line, if there’s ever a dispute over who truly owns the property.

For example, there have been cases where one person attempted to claim a house they inherited from a deceased relative, only to find that the house was sold years before and the deceased relative never changed their will to reflect that. At other times, less-than-honorable people have sold the same property to multiple buyers, creating duplicate deeds for every person they sold it to. In these cases, whether someone recorded their deed can mean the difference between whether they get to keep the property they bought (or inherited, as the case may be).

Wingate, Kearney & Cullen, LLP represents buyers and sellers of residential and commercial properties including co-ops, condominiums, single-family homes, and multiple family dwellings. With law offices conveniently located in Brooklyn, New York, and Melville, New York, our lawyers are available to assist residents of the five boroughs of New York City and Nassau and Suffolk County on Long Island with their real estate needs. If you are looking to buy or sell real estate, call (718) 852-5900, or reach us through our contact page.