Re: judge doesn't like redacted amounts on trustee's deed

Changing the face of the deed by blacking something out probably doesn't look good, even though it's lawful. It calls attention to itself. If you want to continue to record trustee's deeds that omit the transfer tax on the face of it, I'm wondering if it would be possible to ask the trustee to not put it on the face and fill out the disclosure of transfer tax required by the recorder? The majority of trustee's deeds in my farm do not put the transfer tax on the face of the deed, but I don't know if foreclosure trustees are doing this at the request of the buyer. Escrow does it when I ask, and I do it for deeds that I prepare myself, but I can see the problem the judge has here. He's not looking at a deed with transfer tax indicated elsewhere. He's looking at deed with blacked out or whited out info. How's he to know when that happened, and by who. Same with writing in the margin.....even though the bulk of writing in the margin I've seen is done by the recording staff.

I say there's probably not much benefit these days to omitting the transfer tax on the face of most trustee's deeds because 1) the info is culled from the behind the desk binder and reported by the data servers I use and 2) re-sales involving lenders with seasoning and/or added value issues are going to need to know all the details anyway.