When the Name on the Solar Contract Is Not the Name on Title

Escrow is running on a Claremont solar home. The provider is asked to confirm the terms and process a transfer, looks up the account, and reports that the person selling the house is not the person on the contract.

Nothing improper has happened. In almost every case the mismatch has a dull explanation: the property was moved into a trust years after the panels went up, a name changed on marriage, one spouse signed and the other did not, or somebody spelled a middle initial differently on two documents.

The explanation does not matter to the provider's file. What matters is that a company is being asked to act on an account and its records do not match the person asking.

Anthony is a real estate licensee, not an attorney, a lender, a contractor or a tax adviser. Vesting and contract questions can carry real legal consequences and belong with counsel and with the title company. Provider procedures change; confirm anything specific with the provider itself before relying on it.

Two documents, two institutions, no synchronization

This cluster keeps returning to the same structural fact, and it is the fact here too. A solar home generates parallel records at parties that do not talk to each other: the county records ownership, the utility records the interconnection, and the provider records a contract. Nothing propagates a change from one to the others.

So a homeowner who deeds the property into a family trust has changed how the property is held and has not touched the solar agreement, which continues to name an individual. Both records are accurate about different things, and they now disagree on their face.

Nobody notices, because nothing depends on the agreement between them, until a transaction does. What appears in the property records, and why the title report is where this usually surfaces, is set out in the title report guide.

The common causes

• A transfer into or out of a revocable trust after the system was installed.
• A name change on marriage or dissolution, reflected on title and never reported to the provider.
• One spouse or partner signing the solar agreement while title is held by both.
• Title held by an entity while the contract names an individual, or the reverse.
• A death, after which title passes and the contract does not follow automatically. That situation carries its own set of problems, worked through in the inherited solar guide.
• A plain clerical difference: a middle name, an initial, a suffix, a misspelling.

The severity ranges from an afternoon's paperwork to a genuine question about who is entitled to act. Only reading the documents tells you which.

Why the provider will not simply proceed

Because the provider is being asked to release, transfer or confirm an obligation, and doing that for the wrong person is its risk, not the seller's.

So it applies the same instinct any institution applies: match the request to the file, and where it does not match, ask for evidence. That evidence is typically documentary, and producing it takes days rather than minutes because it usually lives somewhere else.

The formal mechanism for getting the provider's own written statement of terms and status, and the point at which a mismatch tends to surface, is the estoppel process described in the estoppel letter guide.

Why it is worse when it appears late

The mismatch itself is small. Its position in the calendar is what hurts.

A transfer or payoff request already runs on the provider's timetable, and a provider that pauses to resolve an identity question adds a second wait on top of the first. If the resolution requires a document that has to be located, prepared, signed or recorded, that is a third wait. All three land in the part of escrow with the least slack.

Where the mismatch surfaces on a lease transfer, it delays a process that already needed a head start, described in the lease transfer guide. Where it surfaces on a payoff, it delays a release the buyer's lender may be waiting on.

How to find it before it finds you

The check takes ten minutes and belongs in listing preparation, not in escrow.

• Read the vesting on the current deed exactly as written.
• Read the signature block of the executed solar agreement exactly as written.
• Compare them character by character, including middle names, initials and suffixes.
• Log in to the provider's account and check the name it holds, which is occasionally different again.
• Where anything differs, contact the provider in writing now, describe the difference, and ask what it requires to act.
• Where a trust, an entity, a death or a dissolution is involved, take it to counsel and to the title company rather than solving it by correspondence.

What resolution usually looks like

For a clerical difference, an updated identification document or a written explanation is often enough, at the provider's discretion.

Where the difference is structural, the answer is more likely to be a document that establishes authority to act: trust documentation, a certificate, an order, or an instrument executed by the party the provider does recognize. What is appropriate is a legal question, and it is answered by the people qualified to answer it.

What is not a solution is arguing that the difference is obviously immaterial. It may well be. The provider still needs its file to support what it is being asked to do.

Where to go next

Compare the deed and the contract before the property is listed, and raise any difference with the provider in writing while there is still time for it to be dull. The wider set of transaction issues is collected in the solar homes guide.

Anthony Grynchal has been licensed in California since November 2009.