Wilmington Savings Fund Society, FSB v. Stapleton CA3

BACKGROUND

In 2004, Stapleton obtained a loan to finance the purchase of a home in Placer County. The prior homeowners conveyed the property to Stapleton by grant deed and, at the same time, Stapleton’s wife also conveyed the same property to him by interspousal transfer grant deed. A deed of trust, which was intended to cover the whole of the purchased property, secured Stapleton’s loan and named Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems Inc. (MERS), the lender’s nominee, as the beneficiary. (See Fontenot v. Wells Fargo Bank, N.A. (2011) 198 Cal.App.4th 256, 270 [“A ‘nominee’ is a person or entity designated to act for another in a limited role—in effect, an agent”], disapproved of on other grounds in Yvanova v. New Century Mortgage Corp. (2016) 62 Cal.4th 919, 939 fn. 13.) Around 2006, Stapleton learned of an issue with the deeds. Because of an apparent oversight, all the deeds—the grant deed, the interspousal transfer grant deed, and the deed of trust—provided an incorrect legal description that omitted part of the property. To address the issue, Stapleton’s predecessors recorded a corrective grant deed in late 2006, and his wife, similarly, recorded a corrective interspousal…