Legal Question in Real Estate Law in California

Re: Step-mother declares ownership of house after father dies

If the property is in California, and your father and stepmother married in California, and no written agreement provides for ownership rights, then you and your siblings have no interest in the property. When you father passed, his interest in the property passed to your stepmother by operation of law. (California is a community property state). Unless there is a written agreement providing otherwise, you and your siblings cannot do anything to stop your stepmother from disposing of the property and keeping the proceeds.

Good luck.

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Re: Step-mother declares ownership of house after father dies

Financially contributing to payments is not the issue here, or at least not the main issue. The main issue is how title is held, of record, down at the County Recorder's office. It may be community property, community property with right of survival, joint tenancy, tenancy in common, or, lo and behold, the house may have been owned of record by your father as separate property, or even (although unlikely) by your stepmother as her separate property (e.g., he might have given it to her as a gift - these things happen).

Further, it looks like your father was someone who did not plan his affairs; therefore it could be that the deed records still show your mother, rather than your stepmother, as the co-owner. That would create an even bigger legal mess.

When someone dies having neither a will nor a living or testamentary trust, the estate passes by the rules of intestate succession. The rules, which are too long to quote fully on a bulletin board, are found in the Probate Code at sections 6400 onward. Generally, a surviving spouse receives 1/2 of the community property. However, the house may or may not have been community property, or it may have been partly community property and partly your father's separate property. The balance is usually divided among the decedent's offspring (or "issue," to use the language of the statute.

If the house were owned as community property with right of survival (somewhat unlikely, as this is a new statutory way to hold title) or as joint tenants, the stepmother (if named in the deed, of course) would become 100% owner.

This estate really requires proper administration, and being that no executor is named, and there is no trustee, you should find out (in addition to finding out how title was held) whether an administrator has been appointed, and if so, who it is and who caused that person to be appointed. Every county has a public administrator who is sort of the administrator by default, and you might contact that official (try the County's Web site).

In some counties, you can dig up a limited amount of information about property ownership on line from the assessor's or recorder's Web site. In all probability, this will not suffice to answer the title-of-record question.

In the end, your interests would be best served by finding a lawyer in or near the county where the house is located to look at the probate and recorder's records and advise you and your siblings on how to protect your interests. You need someone who practices either adiminstration of estates law or real property law, or both.

Re: Step-mother declares ownership of house after father dies

In the light of Mr. Guerrini's answer, I see I need to correct or clarify the third paragraph of my prior response to your question.

It is indeed true that if the house was 100% community property of your father and your stepmother, then she is now the 100% owner of the house, because, under the rules of intestate succession, she receives the 50% she didn't already own.

However, it is UNLIKELY that the house was 100% community property of your father and stepmother. If your father and mother bought the house in the 1960s, by 1986 it would probably have been paid off, or at least 1/2 paid off. So, when your mother died, your father became (probably) 100% owner of a nearly-paid-off house. You don't say when he remarried, but by then the house was probably even more fully paid off.

So, then he marries the stepmother. Unless he made a gift of an ownership interest to her through some express document such as a gift deed, she has zero ownership at the moment of marriage. Then, to the limited extent that payments of purchase-money principal are made after their marriage, such payments result in their marital community developing a so-called "pro tanto" interest, which is half hers, half his, but the lion's share remains his. The pro tanto interest develops because community earnings are used to make principal payments, and it has nothing to do with which spouse earns the income by working - the earnings of either or both spouses during marriage are community property.

So, you need a lawyer who understands the math of California community property to figure out the community interest, which is likely to be very small - my ballpark guess is your father owned around 70% of the house as separate property, and the community interest would then be about 30%. The percentages could be different if there were unusual financing or gifts of ownership were made. Stepmother would then own 30% and the balance would be subject to division under the intestate rules - one half to her, one half to the offspring. So, if you have two siblings, X and Y:

Stepmother gets 30% + 1/2 of 70% = 65%

You get 1/3 of 1/2 of 70% = 11.67%

Sibling X gets 1/3 of 1/2 of 70% = 11.67%, and

Sibling Y gets 1/3 of 1/2 of 70% = 11.67%.

Again, there are many facts that could change the outcome, and your starting point should be to determine how title was held and who is administering the estate. Then dig up the payment history and have a lawyer calculate the pro tanto community interest, if this process remains applicable after your title research. With luck, the stepmother's share may calculate out to be a lot less than 65%, but ordinarily she is not going to get less than 50%.