Two deeds can transfer the same house on the same day. One leaves you with a legal promise worth suing over. The other leaves you with whatever the seller happened to own.
A warranty deed transfers ownership and guarantees the title: the grantor promises they own the property free of undisclosed claims and will defend that claim against anyone who challenges it. A quitclaim deed transfers whatever interest the grantor has, if any, and promises nothing. Same effect when the title is clean. Very different outcome when it is not.
This is a glossary entry in the public records guide for real estate. Nothing here is legal advice; deed law is state law and a real estate attorney is cheap next to a title problem.
The comparison, in one table
| Quitclaim deed | Warranty deed | |
|---|---|---|
| What it transfers | Whatever interest the grantor holds, which may be none | Full ownership as described |
| Title guarantee | None | Grantor warrants clear title and defends it |
| Covers title defects from | Nothing | The entire chain of title, in a general warranty deed |
| Who it protects | The grantor | The grantee |
| Typical use | Family transfers, divorce, into or out of a trust or LLC, clearing a clouded title | Arm's length sales |
| Money usually involved | Often none | Full purchase price |
| Title insurance | Insurers may decline or limit coverage | Standard, and normally required by a lender |
| Lender acceptance | Rarely accepted for a purchase | The standard instrument |
The short version most people need: if you are buying from a stranger, you want a warranty deed. If your aunt is putting you on title to the family cabin, a quitclaim is normal and fine.
What a quitclaim actually does
A quitclaim deed conveys the grantor's interest and makes no representation that any interest exists. If your neighbor signs a quitclaim deed to you for the Space Needle, the deed is valid and you get exactly nothing, because that is what they had.
Washington's version is set out in RCW 64.04.050, which gives the statutory form and states its effect plainly: the deed conveys the grantor's existing interest and nothing more. No covenants, no warranties, no promises about liens.
This is why quitclaims are the tool for situations where the parties already trust each other and the point is to move title, not buy it: adding or removing a spouse, transferring into a revocable trust or an LLC, gifting to a family member, clearing a cloud on title, or correcting a defective earlier deed.
What a quitclaim does not do is touch the mortgage. This trips up nearly everyone going through a divorce. Signing a quitclaim removes your name from title and leaves your name on the loan, because the deed and the note are separate documents and the lender was not a party to either your marriage or your deed. The only reliable way off the loan is a refinance or a formal assumption.
What a warranty deed promises
A general warranty deed carries covenants that run backward through the entire chain of title, not just the grantor's own period of ownership. Washington's statutory warranty deed form is in RCW 64.04.030, and the covenants it implies are the standard six: seisin (the grantor owns it), right to convey (they may legally transfer it), against encumbrances (no undisclosed liens or claims), quiet enjoyment (nobody with a superior claim evicts you), warranty (the grantor defends the title), and further assurances (they sign whatever else perfects it).
A special warranty deed narrows those covenants to the grantor's own period of ownership. Common in commercial deals, bank REO sales, and transfers from estates and trustees, where the grantor genuinely does not know what happened before them. Washington also has a middle instrument at RCW 64.04.040, the bargain and sale deed, which implies the grantor owns the property and has not encumbered it themselves but does not warrant against prior claims.
None of these replaces title insurance. A warranty is a promise you enforce by suing a grantor who may be broke, dead, or dissolved. Title insurance is a company paying the claim. Buyers get both for a reason.
Which one to use
| Situation | The usual instrument | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Buying a home from a stranger | Statutory warranty deed | You need the covenants and the lender will require them |
| Divorce, one spouse taking the house | Quitclaim deed | Removes the other from title; refinance still needed for the loan |
| Moving your own property into an LLC or trust | Quitclaim deed | No arm's length sale, no title question, ownership is not really changing |
| Gift to a child or relative | Quitclaim deed | Standard, and usually exempt from transfer tax |
| Estate or trustee selling to a buyer | Special warranty or fiduciary deed | The seller cannot warrant history they were not present for |
| Buying an REO or foreclosure property | Special warranty deed | Lender warrants only its own period; buy the title policy |
One Washington note: even a $0 family quitclaim is a transfer, and the state requires a real estate excise tax affidavit for it. Exempt transfers, gifts and divorce settlements among them, claim an exemption under WAC 458-61A rather than skipping the filing. The Department of Revenue's real estate excise tax page has the current rates and forms.
What these deeds look like in county data
Deeds are public records, and county assessors code the instrument type on every recorded transfer. I pulled the King County sales extract we ingest, covering 34,439 recorded transfers in Seattle between 2024-06-03 and 2026-07-22, and decoded the instrument codes against the county's own lookup table.
| Instrument | Recorded transfers | Recorded at $0 |
|---|---|---|
| Warranty deed | 19,347 | 1,538 (8%) |
| Quit claim deed | 10,469 | 10,009 (95.6%) |
| Statutory warranty deed | 1,890 | 385 (20%) |
| Deed, unspecified | 1,705 | 1,119 (66%) |
| Bargain and sale deed | 224 | 66 (29%) |
| Deed of personal representative | 211 | 173 (82%) |
| Trustee's deed | 163 | 71 (44%) |
Two things fall out of that. Quitclaims are 30.4% of all recorded transfers, far more than most investors assume. And 95.6% of them record at a sale price of zero, which is the fingerprint: no money changed hands, so this was not a sale.
That matters operationally. A $0 quitclaim looks like a recent sale to any system reading the sales feed, and a recent sale is normally a reason to drop a property from a lead list. Treating it as a new arm's length owner throws away good leads, so we run a hard price floor in the scoring engine below which a recorded transfer does not count as a sale at all. That rule exists specifically because of quitclaims.
The county also codes a reason on each transfer, and the quitclaim reasons read like a list of life events: 6,795 coded other, 1,495 trust, 697 property settlement, 535 divorce settlement, 279 community property established, 127 estate settlement.
We tested quitclaims as a distress signal. They are not one.
The obvious hypothesis, and the one I went in with, is that a quitclaim marks a property in transition, and property in transition means an owner under pressure. Divorce, death, a family transfer. It sounds right.
So I checked it against our code violation history, which is the closest proxy we have for observable distress. Every Seattle property in that sales feed, split by the deed that moved it, matched against whether the property has ever carried a code violation case:
| Deed type on the transfer | Properties | Also carry a code violation |
|---|---|---|
| Warranty deed family | 20,220 | 1,882 (9.3%) |
| Quitclaim deed | 9,504 | 892 (9.4%) |
Identical. The deed instrument tells you nothing about whether the property shows distress.
The sub-slices do not rescue it. Quitclaims coded as a divorce settlement carry violations at 7.0% (37 of 530), and estate settlements at 5.6% (7 of 124). Both sit below the warranty deed baseline. The only slice that runs high is property settlement at 13.3% on 663 properties, a thin enough sample that I would not build anything on it.
These are co-occurrence rates in one county over roughly two years, not probabilities, and they say nothing about whether an owner is willing to sell. But the direction is clear enough to act on: do not buy a quitclaim-transfer list expecting distressed sellers. The deed type records how title moved, not why.
What does track observable distress is the enforcement record itself, which is why our lists come from code violations and the signals that stack on them. The reasoning is in leading vs lagging indicators, and the other hypotheses we have killed in public are in distress signal false positives.
Frequently asked questions
Is a quitclaim deed bad?
No, it is the wrong tool for a purchase and the right tool for everything else. Between family members, into a trust, or to clear a title defect, a quitclaim is standard practice. Accepting one from a stranger in exchange for money is where people get hurt, because you have paid for a promise that was never made.
Does a quitclaim deed remove someone from the mortgage?
No. The deed changes who is on title. The mortgage is a separate contract with the lender, who is not a party to the deed and is not bound by it. Removing a name from the loan takes a refinance or a lender-approved assumption. This is the single most common misunderstanding in divorce transfers.
Can you get title insurance with a quitclaim deed?
Sometimes, and on worse terms. Because a quitclaim makes no representation about title, insurers examine the chain more carefully and may decline, exclude specific risks, or require a warranty from someone else in the transaction. Ask the title company before the deed is drafted, not after it is recorded.
How do I find out what kind of deed transferred a property?
Search the county recorder, called the auditor in Washington, by property address, parcel number, or party name. The recorded document index lists the instrument type on every filing, and most counties let you view or download the document image free. Property owner search by county covers where each county puts its search, and how to find out who owns a property covers reading the result.
Why does a recorded deed show a sale price of $0?
Because no money changed hands. Gifts, divorce transfers, moves into a trust or LLC, and title corrections are all real recorded transfers with no purchase price, and they get recorded at zero with a transfer tax exemption claimed. In the King County data above, 95.6% of quitclaim deeds recorded at $0. If you are reading a sales feed, this is the pattern to filter out before you conclude a property recently sold.