Title problems - your weirdest story

[Account Closed]

So here is my weird story. I buy and fix up a condo and put it on the market. I get a great offer from my first showing. I accept the offer subject to the buyer getting financing and I sit back and wait for the closing.

The closing date is set and I get ready to move as the condo has to be vacant on closing. My lawyer calls 3 days before the closing date to say the title insurance company won't insure the title because there's an issue. Well...

I had bought the property from a woman, her husband had just died and she was also sickly. Some time after I had purchased the property, her daughter dies in a car crash and she herself dies from an illness. Very sad story. Only the son, 18 years old, is left to sort out the three estates together with his aunt who is an executor.

The lawyer handling the three estates is either grossly incompetent or just plain crooked. He advises them to create a trust and put all the money and all the assets into the trust. Probably sound legal advice but then he proceeds to file paperwork at the court to put my property into that trust. To note, he does this a full year after the property had transferred into my name. I repeat, when I purchased the property I took over a clean title, a year later, he put the property that I bought into the family trust. Also, he was the lawyer that did the closing for the seller when I bought that property - i.e. he personally knew that the property had been sold and was no longer owned by the family.

While no one was actually claiming they own my property and no one was trying to take it away from me, the title insurance company won't insure title as it isn't "clean" so I need to get the son (the only remaining heir) and the aunt (the executor) to sign a quit claim deed. Of course, the lawyer (who set up the trust) is not willing to help (give me a phone number or an address) because then he would have to admit to being a crooked idiot. 

That being said, the closing was booked and my buyer's mortgage offer from the bank was expiring. He had just gotten a large cash gift from a family member which he had deposited into his bank account (against his realtor's advice) and would not be able to requalify for the mortgage if his offer expired. And, I'd signed a lease on a rental apartment, paid my deposit and a broker's fee and had the movers booked for my move the next day...

I became an instant private investigator. I called all my neighbors (the previous owners had lived in the neighborhood for years), I called the sellers agent from when I had purchased a few years before, I signed up for memberships on background screening websites. I pretty much hunted these people down, persuaded them to let me come to their house on a Saturday night with a notary to sign the quit claim deed and was able to close on the Tuesday. If I hadn't been able to find them, or if they hadn't agreed to sign the quit claim deed, I would be unable to sell my property to this day.

Undoubtedly, my most stressful closing ever. I feel so sorry for that family, their lawyer totally screwed them over and they lost a lot of money paying fees for unnecessary services and he tangled up their lives at a time they were most vulnerable.