A quitclaim deed is a legal document that is used in transferring property from one owner to another. It transfers all the assumed ownership rights from the granter to the grantee but with no assurances as to what the transferred property rights are. Unlike most property transfer deeds, it doesn’t make the granter liable for any future actions against the title to the property. Since a title search is not required, a quitclaim deed action takes very little time and comes with no guarantees that a property is free of liens or encumbrances.
A common use of a quitclaim deed would be to move property from one family member to another or into a trust. In other family matters, quitclaim deeds are effective for simply removing a spouse from the title or a homeowner giving up the title in order to add a new spouse to the title.
Quitclaim deeds can be a simple way to clean up title errors by removing names that show up in title searches in error.