Understanding the Difference Between Title and Deed in Real Estate (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: If you are a real estate agent or you're interested in becoming a real estate agent, then you have probably heard these two terms, title and deed, used interchangeably. But I'm going to explain today what is the difference and the fact that they are not exactly the same thing. I'm Tiffany Weber. I'm a real estate attorney in Mooresville, North Carolina at Thomas & Weber. Let's get right into it. All right. First, we're going to start with title because this is the foundational concept. Title refers to ownership, your ownership of the property. Title is comprised of a lot of different things. If you're sitting in a law school property class right now, your professor might describe it to you as the bundle of sticks. When you own property, you have this bundle of sticks. One stick might be the right to convey, the right to lease, the right to encumber, the right to possession. You have all of these different rights to do things with your property. When you have all of the sticks, then you own the property in fee simple, absolute. There's nobody that can really tell you what to do with the property. Title refers to your ownership of that bundle of sticks. The deed, which is the physical manifestation of that concept. That is the pen to paper legal instrument that evidences your ownership. It's given from a grantor who is the owner of the property or of any sort of interest in the property to the grantee who is receiving the title to the property. Title comes up in a lot of different contexts. For example, a title search. That's where the attorney is going back in time through the public records to determine who actually owns what related to the property that you are interested in acquiring. You have to do a lot of things related to that. You've got to search the register of deeds. You have to search the court records. You search bankruptcies. You search for liens. You search the secretary of state if there's an entity involved. There's all sorts of searches that have to take place to determine who owns what and do they have the legal right to convey it to the grantee. Another thing that title comes up in is title insurance. Title insurance companies step in and they take on the risks that, okay, the title search revealed that this person is the owner of the property. We, having not been there when the deeds were signed back and back and back, we may not know if there was any sort of fraud involved. If one of those conveyances was fraudulent, we don't want the buyer to be harmed by that. We will insure over that to make sure that the buyer is either defended in any sort of suit that may occur or they're compensated for their actual losses. Now, back to deeds. There are different types of deeds and they are not all created equal. There are different covenants that the seller has to make depending on the type of deed. A quick claim deed is whatever I've got, I'll give it to you. I don't know if I have anything. I could, I'm not going to, but I could go sign a quick claim deed for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue right now and, you know, have it recorded. I don't have an ownership interest in that property. So, I'm not giving anything away because I don't actually have anything to give. So, a quick claim deed is just saying, whatever interest I've got, I'll give it to you. Another type of special warranty deed saying, I will defend you as to ownership, but only for the time period that I own the property, meaning the grand tour. And then a general warranty deed is, I own the property, I have the right to convey it, promise to you that I have the ability to do this and I'll defend you should some issue come up. So, general warranty deed is not confined in time. So, those are different types of deeds. All right, it's pop quiz time. You are at the closing table and there were some documents passed around and one of them was signed by the seller and given to you as the buyer and it is how you got ownership of the property. So, what was it? Was it the title or was it the deed? Ding, ding, ding. It was the deed. The deed is the physical document that evidences your ownership of the property. So, I think the simple way to think about it is title is the concept of ownership and deed is the physical thing that evidences the ownership. So, long-winded way to explain a short topic. Hopefully, that helped you understand the difference in title and deed and that they are not exactly the same thing. If you want more educational videos like this one on real estate topics, go check out the rest of the videos on my channel and I'll see you in the next video.