Captain Obvious and First Mate Jill
Transcript:
Jack Butala: Jack Butala with Jill DeWit.
Jill DeWit: Hi.
Jack Butala: Welcome to our show this early morning. In this episode, Jill and I talk about Captain Obvious and his first mate. We have some good stories from his show that we went to. A live that we went, Real Estate show, that we went to last night.
Jill DeWit: You know what, it's early for us, but it's not early for everybody listening. They don't know how early we're recording today.
Jack Butala: Before we get into this Captain Obvious business.
Jill DeWit: It's early.
Jack Butala: Let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free.
Jill DeWit: Okay. Jonathan asked: "Do real estate transactions in South Carolina need to be supervised by an attorney?"
Jack Butala: Well Jonathan, thank you for asking this question. I actually did a little bit of research to very thoroughly, and hopefully conclusively, put this topic to rest for everyone. It comes up probably once every other week. It certainly comes up on a ton of the Wednesday, er excuse me, Thursday webinars that Jill and I do every week, which you're welcome to join by the way. If you go to landinvestors.com, it shows you how.
But here, I'm gonna read directly from a couple of statutes and the states in question are generally as follows: Alabama, Delaware, New York, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, which is the question, and a little bit of a version in Massachusetts. Here's the deal. Like being a real estate agent, all of these statutes are written for people who represent other people in real estate transactions, like a real estate agent. If you're representing yourself, which is really not even accurate to say. If you're doing your own deal, you do not, generally, need an attorney. Supervised by an attorney means that there's an unrelated, uh everybody's unrelated. The seller's unrelated. The buyer's unrelated.
So let me read, this made it real clear for me, let me read you this sentence out of the Alabama Statute: "In Alabama, non-attorneys can conduct closings", period. Non-attorneys can conduct closings. However, there are restrictions both in Alabama Code and a case law on what activities a non-attorney can perform related to the closing. The section code, defined by the practice law, permits a non-attorney to prepare title abstracts and issue title insurance, provided the non-attorney does not prepare deeds or other legal documents unless the non-attorney has a proprietary interest, that's us, in the property.
I know this is a little bit boring. It's really boring for Jill, you should see her right now.
Jill DeWit: Oh my goodness. Eyes glossed over.
Jack Butala: Doing your own deals every morning?
Jill DeWit: Counting ceiling tiles.
Jack Butala: If you're doing your own deals, you're gonna be okay. Once in a while, we get reports of rogue recorders, county recorders, saying you can't submit your own deal. That's just not true.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: Can you do it in South Carolina supervised by an, and need to be supervised by an attorney, Jonathan? Conclusively, I believe that if you walk in the county and deed a property to your brother-in-law, you're gonna be okay.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative)- We know it and one that you and I, that you're famous for reminding us Jack is.
Jack Butala: It's Captain Obvious, by the way.
Jill DeWit: It is Captain Obvious.