So what is a quiet title action in Arizona? I’m Kent Berk and I’m an attorney at the Scottsdale, Arizona law firm of Berk Law Group, P.C. where we handle real estate and other types of disputes in Arizona.
A quiet title action simply is a lawsuit for the court to declare who owns title to real property or to decide competing claims to real property. Now typically, in a quiet title action, a winning party is not entitled to recover attorney’s fees. But Arizona has a statute where if you send a quit claim deed to the party who’s adversely claiming title to property that you claim, along with $5 and give them 20 days within which to sign the quit claim deed and disclaim or give up any interest in the real property and they don’t do it and return it within 20 days and then you file your quiet title action and you win, then the court has discretion to award you your attorney’s fees in addition to your taxable court cost. So using a quit claim deed under that statute is usually an effective way to help make you whole if you win in a quiet title action. Situations where a quiet title action might be appropriate would be if there’s a forged deed that you want to have invalidated, if there’s a deed that someone signed that might be invalid because they didn’t have legal capacity, mental capacity to sign the document or they didn’t understand it or they were unduly influenced, a quiet title action can also be used to decide competing claims to different boundaries of real property and other situations.
If you have any questions regarding a quiet title or other real estate disputes in Arizona, please don’t hesitate to give us a call. Thank you.