Title Advice

[Ch0pstix]

I will be helping my ex-roommate out by trying to sell his bike.  It's a 2000 SV650.  It has a GSX-R front end and possibly rear as well.  He bought it 2 years ago from a guy in Duluth.  They went back and forth about getting the title signed over.  In the end, my roommate is saying that the title is under his name in Duluth, but in Mpls at the DMV, it is under the previous owners name.  Does this make sense?  He now lives in California and will not be traveling back to MN any time soon.

I would ideally want to straighten this out before selling the bike, as it would be worth twice as much with a clean title.

Any help would be appreciated.  Maybe point me to the right people.

-Duke

[Deplorable, thank you!]

Stay away from the Apple Valley DMV......


Contact the previous owner, get a duplicate title, have him sign it (to you or your california buddy) and then transfer the title and in 6 weeks you will have your clean title in your or your buddies name....

Some driving around can speed up the process some, but to really speed it up, transfer the title straight to your name from the previous owner and drive right to the main dmv office in St Paul and do the transfer there (cut you down to about 2 weeks to having that new title in hand)...saves you a step of mailing back and forth and it will be far easier for you to sell "your" bike than someone elses.
I assume you guys have enough trust in each other, to do this...

[Ray916MN]

The only way to get a clean legal title is to have a title signed over from the current owner to your buddy. If the DMV record shows the bike titled in the name of the person your buddy bought the bike from, then your buddy's story is bunk. The DMV system is a state wide system and whatever shows up in Minneapolis will be the same thing that shows up in Duluth. If he means he has a title signed over to his name somewhere in Duluth, tell him to get that title to you.

In order to sell it, since it is not titled in his name, he needs to get a title signed by current owner transferring ownership to your friend. If the current owner doesn't have a copy of the title they will need to apply for a copy of the title from the DMV and then sign it over to your friend. I hope whoever your friend bought the bike from is honest, because if they aren't, once they find out they are still the legal owner and that your friend lacks the documents to prove ownership they can report the bike stolen and tell the police where they think it is and get them to recover it.

Once he gets a signed title transferring the bike to his ownership, he will need to pay state sales tax and an application for title fee to be able to get a new title so it can be sold. He will also probably want to pay the title processing expedite fee as vehicle titles are currently taking 3 months to get processed.

To avoid the tax and title processing fee (probably a bit under $200), it is possible, although illegal, that he could ask the person he bought the bike from to sign the title without filling in the information on who he sold the bike to. Doing this would mean, when he sold the bike, the buyer's info could just be filled in on the title and there would never be a record that he owned the bike. This is illegal and it is possible that the DMV would be able to catch the seller and your friend and assess fines and collect all taxes and fees due. The law requires sellers to report vehicle sales to the DMV within a short period of time (a week?), complete with the buyer's name, address and drivers license number. I'm not sure what happens when this doesn't get done. DMV desks are also very sensitive to the way titles are filled out and when the ink and handwriting for key information that is filled out in a sales transaction they will ask about it. As a seller, I would refuse to sign a title without filling in and reporting the buyer info as required. There is no upside for the seller for doing anything else and clearly there is some downside. Finally, a signed title without the buyer information filled out is "live". This means if you lose it, and someone finds it and fills in their name, they become the legal owner of the vehicle.

While a bike with a title maybe worth twice what a bike without a title is worth, with the possibility of the current owner  taking the bike back with very little recourse to stop it, selling it without the title or parting it out, may make more sense.

As you might surmise, all the preceding is one of the reasons why bikes without titles are worth so much less than bikes with titles.

[Ray916MN]

Oops forgot to mention one other detail. If the previous owner had a loan on the bike, the title will be noted as having a lien and in order to completely transfer the title the owner will also have to provide a lien release notice from whoever they had a loan with. The notice gets handed into the DMV with the signed title when the title transfer to your friend gets done.