What Is a Lien on a House and How Does It Affect a Sale?
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 serious these things can get.
I’m Andrea Van Soest, a licensed real estate agent (California DRE #01505854) and co-founder of SoCal Home Buyers. As the listing agent on every property we rehab and sell, liens on title come up in this work regularly.
You get a preliminary title report and something is attached to the property the seller never mentioned, and now the whole transaction has a new layer to work through.
We’ve run into them on the buy side too, over 400 transactions across Southern California, and the range of what shows up is pretty wide.
We’re a cash buyer, and worth saying upfront, I have a real interest in sellers going this route, so keep that in mind as you read.
What a Lien Actually Is
A lien is a legal claim tied to a debt and it attaches to the home’s title, so the property can’t easily be sold or refinanced until that claim gets addressed. The lender or buyer finds it during the title search and they’re going to want it dealt with before moving forward, sometimes before closing, sometimes it gets handled out of the proceeds, depends on the situation.
It’s also public record, the creditor files with the county and from there it’s part of the property history, not just the owner’s personal credit.
How Liens End Up on a Property
The ones you agreed to
Your mortgage is a lien. You agreed to it, the bank has a claim on the property until it’s paid off, that’s the deal, and car notes work the same way.
Those are voluntary and they don’t cause problems.
The ones that get placed without your consent
The involuntary ones are different. These get placed on your property by creditors even if you never agreed to it and a lot of homeowners find out they have one when they’re already mid-transaction trying to sell or refinance.
Tax liens
If you fall behind on property taxes, the county can place a lien on your home. In California the county gets paid before pretty much anyone else does and these can eventually lead to foreclosure if they go unresolved long enough.
Which is why they’re worth taking seriously early.
Mechanics liens
A contractor or subcontractor who did work on your home and didn’t get paid can file a mechanics lien against the property. This one catches people off guard because sometimes the homeowner paid their general contractor and the GC just didn’t pay the subs.
And now there are liens filed by people the homeowner never even had a direct relationship with.
It happens more often than you’d expect. Who can put a lien on a property covers this in more detail if you’re dealing with a contractor situation, and Nolo’s California mechanics lien guide walks through the filing windows and what contractors are required to do before they can place one.
Judgment liens
If someone sues you and wins, a court judgment can be converted into a lien on your real property. Medical debt, personal loans, civil suits, any of these can follow you to the property record if it goes to court and doesn’t go your way.
Nolo’s California judgment lien guide covers how they attach to property and what it takes to clear one.
HOA liens
If you’re in a homeowners association and fall behind on dues, the HOA can place a lien on your property. HOA liens can actually lead to foreclosure in California under certain circumstances, which most people don’t realize until they’re already in a bad spot.
In December 2023 we closed on a condo at 27009 Karns Court in Canyon Country for $365,000, and the thing that almost killed the deal had nothing to do with the property itself. The condo had an HOA lien from delinquent dues and it became the only thing standing between us and closing.
The lien got routed to the HOA’s attorney for processing, and that attorney’s office was closing for the holidays on December 21 and not coming back until January 3. Escrow was pushing hard to get the demand and release before they went dark.
We got it with days to spare and the sellers got the proceeds they needed to buy a mobile home in Nevada. That one worked out, but a week later in the process and it wouldn’t have.
Federal tax liens
If you owe back taxes to the IRS, a federal tax lien can attach to your real property along with your other assets. These are different from local property tax liens and tend to be more complicated to resolve, usually requiring a full payoff or a Certificate of Discharge from the IRS before a sale can close.
They don’t come up as often as property tax liens but they do show up, and they typically take more time to clear than most people expect.
What a Lien Does to Your Ability to Sell
This is where it really starts to matter practically.
When a buyer’s lender orders a title search before approving the loan, any lien on the property is going to come up. Most lenders won’t approve financing on a property with an unresolved lien, so the transaction stalls until it’s dealt with.
Even in a cash sale, the title company is going to find it and require that it be resolved before closing or that there’s a clear plan to address it out of the sale proceeds.
A lot of the time liens do get paid at closing, the title company holds back enough from the seller’s proceeds to satisfy the lien before distributing the rest. That works fine when the lien is manageable relative to the equity in the house.
But if the liens are large enough that there isn’t enough equity to cover them and still leave something for the seller, it gets more complicated. That’s a situation worth talking through carefully before you list.
Most transactions with a lien on title do close, but whether a lien blocks the sale comes down to the type and whether there’s enough equity to satisfy it.
How to Find Out If Your Property Has a Lien
A lot of people don’t know there’s a lien on their property until they go to sell or refinance, and finding liens before they surface at escrow is easier than most sellers expect once you know where to look.
County recorder search
Every California county has a recorder’s office and you can usually pull property records online by name or address, it’s free and most counties have it, though some county systems are a pain to navigate if you’ve never done it before.
Title company or attorney
If you’re already in a transaction the title company runs a full search automatically, so you’ll know soon enough. But if you’re thinking about selling and want to know what you’re dealing with before a buyer finds out, a title company or an attorney can pull a report and it usually isn’t expensive.
Knowing early is a lot easier than scrambling once you’re already in a deal and a lender starts asking questions.
Third-party lien search services
There are also third-party services that charge a fee and tend to give you cleaner results than the county website, which can be clunky especially if you’ve never done it before and aren’t sure what you’re looking at.
How to Get a Lien Removed
Pay the debt
Most of the time you’re just paying off the debt. Once you do, the creditor is supposed to file a release with the county, though you want to follow up and actually confirm that got recorded and not just trust they handled it, because sometimes they don’t.
Dispute it
If you think something was filed wrong, or the creditor missed California’s deadline, get an attorney to look at it before you assume you owe it. Mechanics liens especially have strict filing windows out here and they don’t always get done right.
A lot of people just pay without questioning it.
Negotiate a payoff
With judgment liens especially you can sometimes just call the creditor and offer less than the full amount. They know collecting everything is uncertain anyway and a lot of them would rather take something now.
So it works more often than people think. Worth the conversation.
Wait out the statute of limitations
In California judgment liens generally expire after 10 years if they’re not renewed, which is a long time to sit on something, but depending on how long the lien has already been sitting there it’s sometimes a real option worth considering.
Selling a House with a Lien to a Cash Buyer
We’ve bought houses in Southern California with liens attached to them. Not every deal, but it comes up and it’s not automatically a dealbreaker depending on what the lien is and how much equity the property has.
The way it usually works is we make an offer and the lien gets satisfied at closing from the proceeds. The title company handles the logistics, the creditor gets paid, and the seller gets whatever’s left.
The seller doesn’t have to resolve it themselves before we close, we can handle it as part of the transaction, and it’s a lot cleaner than the seller trying to negotiate it separately first.
Sometimes the situation is more complicated, a lien that’s in dispute, or one where the amounts are large enough that the math gets tight. In those cases we’ll talk through it and figure out if there’s a deal that works for everybody.
Sometimes there is, sometimes there isn’t, and we’d rather tell you straight than waste your time going back and forth on something that isn’t going to work.
If you’ve got a property in Southern California with a lien and you’re trying to figure out what your options are, give us a call at (951) 331-3844 or reach out through the site.
We’ve navigated enough of these situations that we can usually tell you pretty quickly whether it’s workable and what it might look like.
Andrea Van Soest is co-founder of SoCal Home Buyers alongside her husband Doug. She is a licensed California real estate agent (DRE #01505854) and has been buying houses directly from sellers in Southern California since 2008. Together they have closed over 400 transactions across Riverside, San Bernardino, Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego counties.
SoCal Home Buyers Call or text: (951) 331-3844
