I have never seen a deed in North Carolina from Timetravel Traders. I have seen them from several other closing companies, and I don't think I have EVER seen a valid deed from one of those companies when the grantors are individuals. At least one of them lists an out of state attorney as preparing the deeds, and they are still invalid.
An invalid deed is a ticking time bomb that may or may not ever blow up. For a low value timeshare, the liklihood of anyone ever searching the title to find defects may be quite low. Someone with a legal problem with their deed may not ever know it, or it may blow up in their face. Someone putting any real money into a timeshare, however, should certainly not take this risk.
It is not just the closing companies. I know of one situation where some years ago a wholesaler bought over a hundred weeks from an HOA and started reselling them. They got a ''go by'' deed from somewhere, and started preparing deeds in their office. They copied the legal description verbatim from the ''go by'' in every deed, including the week and unit number of a timeshare week that they had never owned in the first place. All they changed was the brief description for the index, which was mere surplusage from a legal standpoint and did not change the fact that the legal desciption was for the wrong week and unit. The resort discovered the problem late in the game (they don't have a lawyer looking at deeds either) and the reseller refused to do anything about it. The HOA did get a quitclaim deed back from the reseller for all of the weeks, and told all of their customers that the HOA would execute a quitclaim to the customers for their correct unit and week if the customer paid the cost of the deed, which they got a bulk price on from a local attorney. Most did so, but some were content to stay with an invalid deed as long as noone was actively preventing them from using their week.
There are a few other states that have the same quirk in real property law as North Carolina, and there may be other quirks other places. Real property law is not the same everywhere, although it is close enough on the surface it may seem so. Deeds are NOT a one size fits all proposition.
The last Timesharing Today had an article about the advantages of using joint tenancy in deeding timeshares, but wisely had a rebutal from an attorney who pointed out that the law on joint tenancies varied from state to state and the arguments of the writer would not apply in all states. In North Carolina, for example, the legislature abolished joint tenancy many years ago, and then the Supreme Court came back and said one could still be created if it was done a particular way. I have seen several of these out of state closing companies use general joint tenancy language in North Carolina deeds, which does not meet the court's requirements, and so creates a tenancy in common. One of the main things buyers are after with a joint tenancy is the right of survivorship, and since most of these deeds seem to be husbands and wives, sadly in most cases they could have easily attained the right of survivorship with a tenancy by the entireties, which would have been created in most cases simply by listing the grantees as husband and wife. The lack of local knowledge by the out of state closing company cost them the right of surviorship that they wanted by using ineffective language from another state.
In-state attorney prepared deeds are not that expensive in many cases. While I suspect that the odds of a closing company getting it right in their own home state are probably fairly good, it is too much of a crap shoot anywhere else.
Dave M said:
Although Carolinian's warnings should not be taken lightly, no one has reported here of having legal problems with timeshare title transfers using any of the closing companies (including Timetravel Traders) referred to in the "how to sell" article, no matter what state the resort is in. Those companies have a few states, such as North Carolina, where they won't operate, but I'm not aware that Virginia is one that they shy away from.
How many TUGgers' transactions do these companies successfully handle each year? Hundreds.