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Selling a house in California can get complicated fast when legal issues are involved. This section is designed for homeowners dealing with property liens, lawsuits, title problems, or disputes over ownership. Whether you’re unsure who can place a lien, need to remove one before selling, or are navigating an easement, these guides will help you move forward with clarity.
You’ll also find resources on Lis Pendens, contested trusts, and other roadblocks that can delay or derail a sale. Our goal is to simplify the legal side of selling, so you can make informed decisions and avoid getting stuck in paperwork, court delays, or misunderstandings.
If you’re facing a legal hurdle while trying to sell your home, these articles are your first step to getting answers—and solutions.
I’ve had sellers tell me their title was clean because they’d never had a major financial problem and didn’t owe anything they were aware of, and then the prelim came back with something they hadn’t thought about in years. It’s rarely dramatic, it’s usually something the seller sort of knew about but assumed had been…
I get calls about lien threats pretty regularly. The seller is usually carrying a lot of stress about it, convinced the thing is real and enforceable, and half the time once we get into the specifics it turns out the threat has no legal mechanism behind it at all. I’ve been working through these situations…
California property liens fall into 11 recognized types, all organized along two axes: voluntary versus involuntary, and general versus specific. Knowing the type early changes how you plan the timeline and determines whether resolution is a simple escrow function or weeks of direct coordination. Most sellers find out about a lien when the title company…
Sellers call me thinking they’ve resolved a lien, and then they find out in escrow it’s still on title. The debt got paid but the release never got recorded with the county, and those are two steps that don’t always happen together. What I see most often are sellers who paid a creditor months before…
If you’ve ever sold a house or tried to refinance one, you’ve probably heard the word lien come up during the title search. Most people know it’s not a good thing to have but not everyone knows what it actually means or what to do about it. And there’s a pretty wide range in how…
The call about the preliminary title report is one of the more common calls we get after someone goes into escrow. A lien nobody knew about, or an ownership gap that should have been resolved years ago, and the first thing everyone wants to know is whether the deal is still going to close. Most…
A lien on your property doesn’t prevent a sale in most cases. Almost everyone dealing with one assumes they’re stuck, but the Green Valley Lake property we closed had three liens totaling $3.3 million on a $230,000 house and it still closed. The basic question on any lien deal is whether the equity covers the…
