Recording a Trust Transfer Deed in Shasta County

The deed is where the estate plan becomes real

A trust transfer deed does one narrow, decisive thing: it changes the recorded owner of your property from you personally to you as trustee of your trust. Until that document is recorded with the Shasta County Recorder, the county's records — the records a title company and a probate court will actually consult — say the house belongs to you, not the trust. Every promise the trust makes about avoiding probate depends on this one recording existing.

The legal description problem (a very Shasta County issue)

A deed doesn't identify property by street address — it uses the legal description: the lot-and-tract or, common on rural North State parcels, a metes-and-bounds description that can run for paragraphs. Around Redding, Palo Cedro, Cottonwood, and Bella Vista, it's routine for a "home" to actually be two or three parcels — the house lot plus adjoining acreage acquired over the years — each needing its own correct description on its own deed. Copying a description with a transposed digit, or deeding one parcel while forgetting the second, creates a defect that may surface only when the family tries to sell — or when the "forgotten" parcel lands in probate. Part of our preparation is pulling the current vesting and legal descriptions from the county records so the new deed matches exactly. You don't need to find your old deed; we research it.

Will the county reassess your property taxes?

The fear that stops many homeowners: "If I transfer my house, do I lose my Prop 13 tax basis?" For a transfer into your own revocable living trust, no. California expressly excludes this transfer from reassessment — you're not selling the property, you're changing the form of your own ownership. The deed is accompanied by a Preliminary Change of Ownership Report (PCOR) telling the Assessor exactly that, which is why the paperwork around the deed matters as much as the deed itself. Your assessed value and your tax bill carry on unchanged.

Will your lender call the loan due?

The second common fear: the mortgage's due-on-sale clause. Federal law (the Garn–St Germain Act) protects transfers of a residential property into the borrower's own revocable trust — your lender cannot treat it as a sale or accelerate the loan. You don't need the bank's permission to record the deed. Keep making the payments; nothing about the loan changes.

What actually gets filed in Shasta County

A complete recording package here is more than the deed itself:

• The trust transfer deed with the exact legal description and correct trustee vesting language
• The PCOR for the Shasta County Assessor
• The documentary transfer tax declaration claiming the exemption that applies to trust transfers
• Notarized signatures, formatted to the Recorder's margin and page requirements

Get one piece wrong and the Recorder rejects the package or — worse — records it with a defect nobody catches for years. We prepare all of it, submit it, and return the recorded deed to you for your records. Property in another California county? Same service; each county's Recorder has its own quirks, and we handle those too.

After it records

Once the recorded deed comes back, your trust is funded with its most important asset. Two habits keep it that way: store the recorded deed with your trust documents, and remember the rule for the future — any newly purchased property should be titled to the trust at closing, and any refinance that pulls the home out of the trust needs a deed back in afterward. Both are quick jobs when they're remembered and expensive ones when they're not.

Families rarely lose to probate because the trust was written badly. They lose because a twenty-minute recording at the county never happened.