Private transfer fee
Open-knowledge reference entry
A private transfer fee covenant is a legal instrument that is filed in the real property records, which imposes an assessment payable in connection with a series of future transfers of title to certain real property. The assessment can be for a fixed amount or a percentage of the sales price, and typically runs for a limited term (usually ranging from 20 to 99 years). Unlike a transfer tax (payable to a governmental entity) a private transfer fee assessment is payable to an identified third-party, often a community association (like a homeowners' association, or "HOA"), the real estate developer, and/or an environmental or charitable organization. According to the Coalition to Save Community Benefits, private transfer fee covenants of some kind encumber approximately eleven million homes in the United States. Although encumbering a statistically small percentage of the estimated 135 million homes nationwide, increased use of private transfer fee assessments, particularly by real estate developers beginning around 2007, when financing became difficult to obtain on commercially reasonable terms, lead to increased regulation at both the federal and state level.
Process
Recordation
Private transfer fee covenants are filed in the real property records of the county in which the real property that is to be made subject to the fee is located. The instrument is typically styled "Declaration of Covenant", "Covenants, Conditions and Restrictions", or similar, and is executed by the property owner, known as the "Declarant". Commonly, the Declarant is a real estate developer who creates the assessment for purposes of recovering expenses incurred in connection with infrastructure and other capital improvements made to or in connection with the property.
Notice
Purchasers of real estate encumbered by a private transfer fee assessment receive both constructive and actual notice of the assessment.
Constructive notice is notice inferred from the record and it exists whether or not the purchaser inspects the record.
“Private transfer fee” enters the record as open-knowledge reference entry. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Private, transfer and Open-knowledge can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Private transfer fee” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.