Congratulations on your marriage! As you embark on this new chapter, you may find yourself needing to update your name on various legal documents, including your house title. Changing your name on your house title after marriage is an important step in ensuring your property records accurately reflect your new status.

To help simplify this process for you, we spoke to Zachary Schorr, one of the top real estate attorneys in Los Angeles. He explains why handling a house title name change promptly can help you avoid homeowner hiccups.

“If you have a mortgage, inform them before you do the transfer because most of the trust or mortgage companies have a ‘due on sale’ clause, but they’re not really going to care if it’s still you. But if you go from Jane Smith to Jane Washington, they may not know it’s the same person, and they then actually would have the ability to call the loan, maybe call it due,” Schorr says.

Steps to change your name on a house title

With expert advice from Schorr and David Roberson, a top real estate attorney from Silicon Valley, we’ve created this handy guide of straightforward steps that will help ensure your house title name change process goes as smoothly as possible.

“Usually, when it’s just transferring title from one name to another — the same person — there’s not going to be any problems that you would run into, especially since there’s no monetary change and we’re not really changing ownership,” Roberson says.

The first step begins with the government.