Ecommerce Website Perfection
Jack Butala: Ecommerce Website Perfection. Leave us your feedback for this podcast on iTunes and get the free ebook at landacademy.com, you don't even have to read it. Thanks for listening.
Jack Butala: Jack Butala with Jill DeWit.
Jill DeWit: Happy Monday.
Jack Butala: Welcome to our show today. In this episode, Jill and I talk about e-commerce website perfection. We talk about what you need, the type of website that you should have, to make it real simple for you to sell property. Before we get into it, though, Jill, let's take a question from one of the members on LandAcademy.com, our online community. It's free.
Jill DeWit: Okay. Matt asks, "I'm looking to buy a piece of land where the wife passed away and the vesting deed says, "As husband and wife as joint tenants." Is this the same as JTROS, which is joint tenants with rights of survivorshits ... -ship."
Jack Butala: Wow.
Jill DeWit: Hello.
Jack Butala: Good morning.
Jill DeWit: "Rights of survivorship." I really said the right thing. Now, if you heard something differently, Jack ...
Jack Butala: I did.
Jill DeWit: Uh huh. "Am I in the clear?" Not me, that's part of the question.
Jack Butala: Oh.
Jill DeWit: That's what Matt put here, not me.
Jack Butala: What do you think?
Jill DeWit: Let me back up and say when I do a deed, I always am very careful to put the full sentence. I put, "joint tenants with rights of survivorship."
Jack Butala: Me, too.
Jill DeWit: Every time. I'm not messing around. I don't want to leave it to chance. I don't want anyone to have to look at this like poor Matt, going, "Is that the same thing?" I always do that. I believe it's the same thing.
Jack Butala: I do, too.
Jill DeWit: I just don't like that.
Jack Butala: I don't think there's any technical difference between the definitions of "joint tenants" and "joint tenants with rights of survivorship." I think they're the same thing. I think most Recorders would agree with that, but why take a chance?
Jill DeWit: Right, because if they meant "tenants in common," which is different ...
Jack Butala: Completely different.
Jill DeWit: ... they would've put, "tenants in common" ...
Jack Butala: That's right.
Jill DeWit: ... which they did not. They put "joint tenants."
Jack Butala: Yeah, I mean, it used to be back, I don't know, probably 10, maybe 15 years ago, up to that point there's a saying that ... My attorney still says it. "Well, the Recorder, whatever you send them ... You could send them toilet paper and they're going to record it."
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: That's just not the case anymore. Throughout your career in land or in any time of real estate, if you're doing your own recording work, some stuff is going to come in. You're going to look at other people's deeds before you and you're just going to laugh. You're going to show it around the office and say, "I can't believe that this actually got recorded in the state."
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: You know, it's kind of your job to clean it up when you get it.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: That's how I look at it.
Jill DeWit: This is true. This is very true.
Jack Butala: The way that you take title, you have control over that. Or if you're conveying it to someone else, you've got a lot of control.
Jill DeWit: Yeah, do it the right way. Save you and your customers and everybody down the road a favor and do it correctly.
Jack Butala: In fact, for years and years we've had the same person at First American kind of managing all the properties that we run through escrow, and she says, "Look, I just record everything as joint tenants, everything. If it's three LLCs, joint tenants, unless somebody asks for something else." This whole notion of husband and wife on a deed ...
Jill DeWit: Oh, yeah.
Jack Butala: ... even if you are married, it's just so much better because then it's got to be estated. I don't want to get into the details,