I want to expand the vision of readers interested in paralegal work in the next few posts, starting with this one. As I’ve written about in this post, not all paralegal jobs are posted at legal firms. There are several areas of concentration where paralegals can carve out a career. For instance, there are many Real Estate agencies, title companies, and other firms that hire paralegals since their skills increasingly rival an attorney’s skills.
Since paralegal jobs don’t demand the same pay, they are in huge demand by these firms and will continue to be well into the future. As a real estate paralegal, your duties would include research and data retrieval needed for various documents such as, deeds, mortgages, foreclosures, property closings, title reports, and more.
Additionally, you may even prepare leases, land contracts, transaction agreements and other documentation. You may deal with evictions, rental agreements, conflicts over lease conditions, or creative financing as well.
Because of the ever increasing amount of legal paperwork involved in the real estate industry, RE paralegals understand purchase and sale, transfers, rules of ownership, and other like real estate matters in your county.
Here are some general duties of a Real Estate paralegal:
- Data retrieval for completion of conveyance documents
- Preparing legal descriptions for land
- Preparing deeds of trust (if you are in a deed state)
- Preparing mortgages (if you are in a mortgage state)
- Preparing leases of all types
- Examining title history and preparing title reports
- Preparing purchase and sale agreements for personal or real property that is being sold, such as a mobile home park, businesses with equipment, etc
These are just a few of the ever expanding duties of real estate paralegals. In future articles, I’ll get into other industry concentrations where paralegals take on an essential role and are highly valued.