Q: My husband passed away recently, and we jointly own a condo. How do I get his name off of the deed? —Kathy
A: Unlike the title to your car, where an actual certificate of ownership gets physically signed over, no single document controls the ownership of real property.
Instead, it is necessary to look at various documents, primarily deeds, to determine who owns the property. These documents, the evidence of ownership, are known to lawyers as “muniments of title.”
Property deeds are a formalized way of verifying someone’s intent to transfer their property to someone else. They get recorded in the public records to put the world on notice of the change.
This is all lawyer-speak for telling you that rather than removing someone from a deed, you need to record another document showing the ownership change.
When two spouses purchase a house, they are said to own it as “tenants by the entirety.” This form of ownership goes back hundreds of years into the history of the law. Back then, property owned by spouses was not owned by them together or even individually because the law considered the couple to be one person.
Instead, the marriage, something distinct from the spouses, was considered to own the property. Back then, women did not enjoy the same rights as men, which allowed the male half of the couple to maintain control of almost everything.
Even so, the law provided at least one strong protection for the wife — survivorship. Despite his substantial control of the property during the marriage, the husband could not sell the property without the wife’s consent.
When the husband died, the wife remained the sole owner and gained control over the property. Back then, most privately owned property was income-producing, such as farms, to put this in context.
A few hundred years passed, and laws were enacted known as the “Married Women’s Property Acts” that went a long way toward treating each spouse equally in control of the marital property.
As society progresses, so does the law, and this form of ownership now applies to married couples of any gender, with each spouse being treated equally.
Some things, however, do remain the same. And therein lies the answer to your question.
When your spouse passed away, you stayed the owner — now the sole owner — of the property. To prove this to the world and effectively remove your deceased husband from the title, you simply have to record his death certificate in the public records.
Because every situation is different, it would be best to consult an experienced attorney before acting.
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