Real Estate
Residential
We strive to provide you with efficient and professional services for your residential real estate needs. As one of the most established real estate law firms in the Asian community of Atlanta, we offer you our knowledge and experience in metro area residential real estate. Whether you are an agent looking for a dependable firm to serve your clients better, an investor who is looking for experienced and reliable legal services to achieve your financial plans, or a household looking to settle down in a new home and save at the same time, our friendly real estate team can offer affordable quality closing service to satisfy all your needs.
The Closing Process
We begin processing the purchase of your new home or refinance of your existing loan once we receive the order from the seller, buyer, lender or mortgage broker involved. We first send an experienced title search attorney to check the title on the property. This attorney investigates to see who the true owner of the property is and whether this owner owes any loan or any city or county property taxes. We also find out whether the current owner has any unpaid homeowners’ association dues or owes any debt according to judgments from a court. After we receive the report from the title search attorney, we clear any outstanding issues on the title. We understand the value of each investment you make, so we take time to ensure that you are getting a title for your property that is as free of liens and other issues as possible. Failure to clear the title thoroughly could cause the new owner to have to pay loans that he did not take out or even risk foreclosure on the property.
As the title is being cleared, our pre-closing department contacts the different parties to obtain information relevant to the transaction. This includes:
- Seller’s information
- Home warranty if required by the purchase contract
- Termite inspection report
- Homeowners’ Association information
- Owner’s current open loans on the property
- Buyer’s hazardous insurance on the property
Once all the information has been gathered and title issues have been resolved, our pre-closing department prepares the Closing Disclosure or CD Settlement Statement (also known as “CD”, “HUD-1” or “Closing Statement”) according to the lender’s closing package. The CD summarizes all the financial transactions involved in the deal. This CD is then sent to the lender for approval. If the lender sends us its approval early enough, we send the CD to the parties involved in the transaction for their review. After the CD has been approved, we prepare the remaining closing documents according to the lender’s instructions and have the parties come to our office to sign them. Our closing attorney presides, explaining all the closing documents to the parties and ensuring that all the documents are executed properly.
After the closing, our post-closing department makes sure that the funds are properly disbursed to the correct parties. We also send documents to the local county court for recording. After we receive the recorded documents from the local county court, we send the recorded limited warranty deed to the buyer (if it’s a purchase) and the recorded security deed to the lender. Please note that if you are doing a refinance, you will not receive any recorded documents from us after closing. However, you do need to cancel any automatic payment services that may be active with your previous lender so that the lender will not continue to draft money from your account.