Deed of Trust vs Assignment vs Release

In a Texas clerk's index, a deed of trust, an assignment and a release look alike: two parties, a date, a document number. They mean three different things, and the grantor and grantee swap roles between them.

A deed of trust is the mortgage. The borrower (grantor) conveys the property to a trustee to secure a loan from the lender (grantee). It creates the lien, and it gives the lender the power to sell without a court if the loan defaults. The first page usually states the original principal and the maturity date. A purchase-money deed of trust is recorded the same day as the deed that conveyed the property; a later one is a refinance, a second lien or a home equity loan.

An assignment transfers the loan to a new holder. The grantor is the holder giving it up; the grantee is the new holder. It changes who can foreclose and who is owed, not what the borrower owes. Loans are assigned when they are sold into securitizations or when servicing rights change hands, so the party foreclosing today is often not the lender named on the deed of trust.

A release of lien (sometimes indexed as a release, a release of deed of trust, or, for an HOA, a release of assessment lien) ends a recorded claim. The grantor is the holder releasing; the grantee is the borrower or owner. For a mortgage it means the loan was paid off or refinanced. For an HOA or judgment lien it means the debt was settled.

A modification is not an assignment; it changes the terms of a loan that stays with its holder. A correction deed of trust fixes an error in an earlier one and creates no new debt. An appointment of substitute trustee names who will conduct a sale; it is the step before a foreclosure notice. A trustee's deed is a deed, not a deed of trust: it conveys the property to the buyer at the foreclosure sale.

The trustee's deed wipes out liens recorded after the foreclosed deed of trust and leaves senior ones in place. To know what survives a sale, you must know which deed of trust is being foreclosed, whether earlier ones were released, and what was recorded in between. The mortgage-tracing guide walks through the searches, and the Dallas County and Collin County pages list what is posted for sale now.