Quiet title; Beulah Hoagland Appleton Qualified Pers. Residence Trust v. Emmet Cnty. Rd. Comm’n; Invalid or absent notary’s acknowledgment; In re Duke Estate; Recording requirements; MCL 565.201(1)(c) & (5); A defective notarization where plaintiff had a good-faith belief it was properly notarized; MCL 565.603 & .604; A forged deed; Special Prop. VI, LLC v. Woodruff; Presumption signatures on a deed are valid; Boothroyd v. Engles; Overcoming this presumption; Mtynarczyk v. Zyskowski; An incorrect legal description; Sufficiency of identifying a property by its street address; Tandy v. Knox; MCL 560.255; Status as a bona fide purchaser for value; MCL 565.29; Notice of a possible interest in the property; Imputing notice of properly recorded documents to subsequent buyers; Richards v. Tibaldi; Principle that notice does not require actual knowledge; Penrose v. McCullough; The grantor-grantee indexing system; MCL 565.28(1) & (2); First Nat’l Bank of Chicago v. Department of Treasury; Claim that incorrect plat & lot information rendered a deed invalid for purposes of providing notice; Distinguishing In re Brandt (WD MI); An incorrect legal description in a mortgage; In re Hudson (WD MI); Deed reformation; Johnson Family Ltd. P’ship v. White Pine Wireless, LLC; Parol evidence; Farabaugh v. Rhode

The court held that plaintiff met her burden in her quiet title action to establish a prima facie case of title to the property at issue. Further, defendant-IDG Holdings could not be considered a bona fide purchaser for value because it had constructive knowledge of facts triggering further inquiry into plaintiff’s possible interest, and such an inquiry would have revealed the conveyance to her as well as her occupancy of the property. Thus, the court affirmed the trial court’s ruling quieting title in plaintiff. IDG attacked the validity of her 2015 deed, asserting that it was a bona fide purchaser when it acquired the property in 2016. It contended that she never acquired a valid interest in the property because her quitclaim “deed contained an erroneous legal description of the property, and because the grantor’s and the notary’s names were forged.” The court disagreed. It first noted there was no evidence suggesting “that plaintiff had, or should have had, any reason to believe that the named notary was not the person who actually notarized the deed.” In addition, the notarization appeared on its face “to comply with all statutory requirements. Thus, even if the notarial acknowledgement was forged, that forgery does not affect the validity of the conveyance as between the grantor and plaintiff, nor does it affect the deed’s recordability.” There also was no competent evidence that the grantor’s signature was forged. While “the deed contained an inaccurate legal description of the property, it also described the property by reference to its common address, and the evidence demonstrated that the parties intended for the deed to be operative with respect to the property at that common address. The trial court was permitted to reform the deed to comport with this intent.” The court also concluded that IDG failed to prove a superior interest in the property. Plaintiff’s deed was properly recorded, and the fact that it contained the correct address “should have induced a reasonable person to make further inquiries into the possibility of competing interests. Indeed, IDG Holding’s own evidence, a ‘DataTrace’ report, shows that plaintiff’s name appeared in the chain of title and was identified as the taxpayer of record for the property.”