Taxes & Liens

Los Angeles County issues a separate Supplemental Secured Property Tax Bill after a sale or inheritance — sometimes two — and the deadlines don’t wait for your regular annual bill.

Culver City charges its own real property transfer tax on top of LA County’s, and Measure RE’s tiered rates run from 0.45% up to 4% of the sale price.

An HOA lien in California does not jump ahead of your mortgage the way it can in some other states — your first deed of trust almost always keeps its priority — but that doesn’t mean the lien is harmless.

Measure ULA adds a surtax of 4% to 5.5% on top of Los Angeles’s existing transfer tax, and it applies the moment your sale price crosses roughly $5.4 million — there is no way to structure around it once that threshold is hit.

If you have owned and lived in your California home for at least two of the last five years, you can exclude up to $250,000 to $500,000 of profit from capital gains tax.

Five kinds of claims can attach to a California house — a contractor’s lien, a judgment lien, a tax lien, an HOA lien, or a Medi-Cal estate recovery claim. Here is what each one actually requires.

A California quitclaim deed transfers whatever interest the signer happens to have, with no warranty of any kind. It does not touch the mortgage, and it can quietly make a house harder to sell.

A quiet title action is a lawsuit asking a California court to declare who owns a property and wipe out competing claims. Not every cloud on title requires one, and the alternatives are usually faster.

Yes — escrow pays the county out of your proceeds at closing. The bigger question is whether you need to sell at all, because California gives residential owners five years of tax default before the tax collector gains the power to sell.