Reviewed by Rozsa Gyene, California attorney. Last reviewed October 2026.
An Irvine estate is probated in Costa Mesa, at Orange County's Probate/Mental Health courtrooms on Harbor Boulevard. Zillow put the typical Irvine home at $1,492,449 on August 31, 2026, and the statutory attorney and executor fees on that value total $55,848.98. A funded living trust keeps the house out of that court for a $400 trust plus a $100 deed.
Sign a revocable living trust, then record a deed moving your Irvine home into it with the Orange County Clerk-Recorder. A home left in your own name goes through probate at the Costa Mesa Justice Complex, and on Zillow's typical Irvine value of $1,492,449 the statutory attorney and executor fees alone are $55,848.98. A University Hills home also needs the housing authority's sublease assignment. The trust costs $400 for one person or $500 for a married couple.
An Irvine address does not change where an estate goes. Orange County hears decedents' estates in its Probate/Mental Health courtrooms at the Costa Mesa Justice Complex, and the probate clerk's office is in the same building. The court moved probate hearings there effective May 1, 2023. Two other courthouses cause confusion. The Central Justice Center in Santa Ana, where the court hears civil and small claims cases from Irvine, does not hear probate. The Lamoreaux Justice Center in Orange houses Probate Court Services, the court's investigators for conservatorships and guardianships, not the probate courtrooms.
Probate in Orange County runs on filing rules that catch families off guard. Local Rule 601.01 requires every document in a Probate Division case to be filed electronically through one of the court's approved filing service providers. Self-represented parties are exempt, and a few originals, including original wills and codicils, still go to the clerk on paper. Before a petition is heard, a probate examiner reviews it and posts notes on the case; the petitioner is expected to clear those notes before the hearing, and the court will send a text or email when a new note posts.
Irvine estates tend to be exactly the kind that generate notes: a house in one village, a condo rented out in another, a brokerage account full of employer shares, sometimes a University Hills sublease that carries its own resale rules. Every one of those assets left in the decedent's name is listed on an inventory, appraised by a probate referee and administered under the court's supervision. Assets already titled in a living trust are handled by your successor trustee with the trust document, the recorded deed and a certification of trust, and no court file is opened for them.
Irvine owners can record at any of the Clerk-Recorder's three offices. The South County Branch sits in the Laguna Hills Civic Center on El Toro Road, south of Irvine, and records real property documents on weekdays. County Administration South on Ross Street in Santa Ana is the other close counter, and the county's help center confirms that an original, signed and notarized document can be recorded in person at any of its locations. Mailed documents go to Santa Ana, with a check, cashier's check or money order payable to the County of Orange. A single counter transaction is limited to three documents, which is enough for a couple deeding their home and two rental condos into one trust. After any recording that affects title, the county mails the owner a free courtesy notice, so a letter about your own trust deed is expected.
The deed runs from you as owner to you as trustee, repeats the legal description and Assessor's Parcel Number from your current vesting deed, and is recorded with the PCOR, on which you check the box for a transfer into a revocable trust. Revenue and Taxation Code §62(d) treats that transfer as no change in ownership, so the Orange County Assessor keeps your Proposition 13 base year value and sends no supplemental bill. The county documentary transfer tax is $0.55 per $500 of value on a sale, but a deed into your own revocable trust is not a sale, and the deed states the Revenue and Taxation Code §11930 exemption so the tax is $0.00. Our office prepares the deed and PCOR for $100 per property; you record them, and the recording is what puts the house in the trust. From January 1, 2027, AB 2224 (Stats. 2026, ch. 292) raises the statutory base recording fee under Government Code §27361 to $15.00 for the first page and $4.00 for each additional page, so the county's posted totals will change. The trust transfer deed guide and our page on living trust property tax rules go further.
One Irvine community needs a second document. In University Hills the land is held under a ground sublease, and the housing authority records its own assignment of that sublease to your trust. That step is explained below under University Hills.
Zillow's Home Value Index put the typical Irvine home value at $1,492,449 as of August 31, 2026 (all homes, middle tier, from Zillow's research data files). That is a typical value, not a median sale price. Probate Code §10810 sets the estate attorney's ordinary fee as a percentage of the gross estate: 4% of the first $100,000, 3% of the next $100,000, 2% of the next $800,000 and 1% of the next $9 million. Gross means the mortgage is ignored, so a recently purchased Irvine house with a large loan produces the same fee as one owned free and clear. Probate Code §10800 gives the executor an equal amount.
Run your own numbers in the probate cost calculator
Before the filing fee, the referee, publication, bond and any extraordinary fees, the attorney and executor fees come to about $55,849, set against a $400 trust for one person or $500 for a couple. The California probate fees guide walks through each charge. The simpler procedures do not reach most Irvine homes: the small estate affidavit under Probate Code §13100 stops at $208,850, and the Probate Code §13151 petition for a primary residence stops at $750,000 for deaths on or after April 1, 2025. Even the lowest neighborhood figure in the table below is above both limits.
Irvine is a planned city of 307,670 people (2020 Census), laid out by the Irvine Company and the architect William Pereira as a string of residential villages separated by arterial roads, with the UC Irvine campus as the pendant of the necklace. Zillow publishes typical values for many of those villages, and the August 31, 2026 figures show how far apart they are. Zillow's UC Irvine neighborhood has the lowest typical value of the group below, and it is still above the $750,000 limit of the §13151 petition.
Shady Canyon shows what the percentage schedule does at the top of the market: the 1% tier runs to $10 million of gross value, so a $9 million estate pays more than $200,000 in statutory fees alone, before any extraordinary fees for selling the property or handling a business.
Irvine's housing looks different from most of Southern California. The November 2021 draft of the city's 2021 to 2029 Housing Element, using state Department of Finance counts, reports that only about 39 percent of its homes are single-family detached houses; about 16 percent are townhomes and other attached single-family homes, about 44 percent are condominiums or apartments, and about 1 percent are mobile homes. The same report describes Irvine as a relatively new master-planned community with multiple homeowners associations, and it notes that the city added the most housing in the 2000s. Older parts of Northwood, developed in the early 1970s independently of the Irvine Company, have no association.
A condominium or townhome goes into a trust by the same deed as a house, using the unit's legal description, which usually includes an undivided interest in the common area. The CC&Rs keep applying to you as trustee, and the association's dues continue as before. Send the association a copy of the recorded deed so its records show the trust, and make sure the successor trustee knows which account pays the dues. If you own a rental condo, the lease and deposit move to you as trustee, and that deed is where the $75 SB 2 fee is charged.
Villages built from the 1980s onward may carry a Mello-Roos special tax, levied through a community facilities district to repay bonds that paid for streets, utilities, parks and other public improvements. One of them is Community Facilities District 2013-3, formed by the City of Irvine and Heritage Fields El Toro, LLC to cover the Great Park and the Great Park Neighborhoods on the former El Toro Marine Corps Air Station. The city says the charge can rise by up to 2% a year; once the original bonds are repaid, which typically takes 40 years, it drops by roughly 65% to 82%, and the remainder continues indefinitely to maintain the improvements.
A trust does nothing to that tax, in either direction. The special tax stays on the secured property tax bill whoever holds title, and Proposition 13 and Proposition 19 protect only the assessed value, not the special tax line. What a trust does provide is continuity: the successor trustee can pay the bill from trust accounts without waiting for a court appointment, and the trust can tell a child who inherits a Great Park home whether the tax is paid from the rest of the estate or by that child.
University Hills is UC Irvine's faculty and staff community, run by the Irvine Campus Housing Authority. According to ICHA it covers 300 acres with 1,714 households, 1,330 of them for-sale homes, and its first phase was finished in 1985. The university is also Irvine's largest employer, with 18,373 employees in the city's 2021 annual financial report. Every University Hills home sits on a lot owned by the Regents of the University of California, leased to ICHA and subleased to the homeowner. The subleases end on October 30, 2082. A resale must first be offered to the university, faculty and staff, the price is capped at a maximum resale price based on the purchase price adjusted by set indices plus approved improvements, and an owner whose university employment changes may no longer be eligible to own.
Those rules shape the estate plan. The house is deeded to the trust in the ordinary way, but the land interest is the sublease, and ICHA moves it with its own Assignment of Ground Sublease to Trust form. ICHA's instructions say to request the form and a PCOR from its sales office, complete them using your recorded memorandum or assignment of ground sublease, sign before a notary, and return them with a $125 check payable to ICHA for recording and administrative fees. ICHA signs, sends the assignment to the county for recording, usually receives it back in three to four weeks, and asks for a copy of your recorded trust deed. Because the sublease ties eligibility to own to university employment, a child who does not work for the university may not be able to keep the home, so the trust should give the successor trustee clear authority to sell under the sublease and say how the proceeds are divided. Our package covers the trust and deed; the ICHA assignment is completed on ICHA's form.
The trust deed copies the legal description from your current vesting deed. If that deed or the title policy from your purchase describes a leasehold estate or a ground lease rather than ownership of the land, the leasehold has to be assigned to the trust as well, and the lease may require the landowner's consent to an assignment. If you later bought the land under a leased lot, the deed for that purchase is the one to copy. Owners who are unsure should check the first page of the grant deed for the words "leasehold" or "ground lease" before signing.
The Housing Element counts 893 mobile homes in Irvine in two parks: The Groves at 5200 Irvine Boulevard with 533 homes and The Meadows at 14851 Jeffrey Road with 360. A mobile home on a rented space is usually titled and registered with the state Department of Housing and Community Development, not recorded with the county, and HCD has its own procedure for changing ownership into the name of a trust (form HCD RT 804.7 covers a home on yearly registration renewal). A county deed does not move it. The space agreement stays between you and the park, so ask the park office what it needs when a trustee or heir takes over.
Besides the university, the city's 2021 report lists Blizzard Entertainment, the Irvine Unified School District and Edwards Lifesciences among its largest employers. Vested shares sitting in a brokerage account are retitled to the trust like any other account. Unvested restricted stock units, options and employee stock purchase plans follow the employer's plan documents, which often have their own beneficiary or transfer rules, so check each plan rather than assuming the trust controls it.
The first phases of Turtle Rock, University Park, Westpark, El Camino Real and Walnut were finished by 1970, so some Irvine owners have held their homes for decades on a low Proposition 13 base. The trust deed keeps that base, because of §62(d). Whether a child keeps it after your death is a Proposition 19 question: at least one child must make the house a principal residence and file for the homeowners' exemption within one year, and market value above your taxable value plus $1,044,586 (for transfers from February 16, 2025 to February 15, 2027) is added to the assessment. With Turtle Rock's typical value at $2,356,408, any house there with a taxable value below $1,311,822 is over that margin. The claim, form BOE-19-P, goes to the Orange County Assessor within three years. Our Prop 19 inheritance guide has the details.
Irvine is younger than the county as a whole; the Housing Element puts residents 65 and older at about 10 percent in 2018. Incapacity planning still matters for the parents of those younger families. If you cannot manage your affairs, your successor trustee manages everything titled in the trust without a conservatorship case at the same Costa Mesa courthouse. The durable power of attorney covers accounts left outside the trust, and the advance health care directive names who speaks for you with your doctors.
A single trust is $400 and a married couple's trust is $500. A deed for your Irvine home, or for an Orange County rental condo, is a separate $100 per property. You reach the attorney directly at (818) 337-4071, and you sign in front of any California notary, so a notary in Irvine is fine. For how the price compares, see what a California living trust costs.
Orange County Superior Court hears probate at the Costa Mesa Justice Complex, 3390 Harbor Boulevard, Costa Mesa, CA 92626, where its Probate/Mental Health clerk's office and courtrooms are located. There is no probate courtroom in Irvine. The Probate/Mental Health line is (657) 622-8452, staffed 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., Monday through Friday, and attorneys must file probate papers electronically under Local Rule 601.01. An Irvine home held in a funded living trust never goes there.
Zillow's typical home value for Irvine was $1,492,449 on August 31, 2026. On that gross value, with no deduction for the mortgage, the statutory attorney fee under Probate Code §10810 is $27,924.49, and the executor may take the same amount under §10800, for $55,848.98 together. The $435 filing fee and a probate referee commission of about $1,492 are added on top. A living trust is $400 for one person or $500 for a married couple.
With the Orange County Clerk-Recorder. The South County Branch at 24031 El Toro Road, Suite 160, Laguna Hills, records real property documents over the counter, as do County Administration South at 601 N. Ross Street, Santa Ana, and the North County Branch at 222 S. Harbor Blvd., Suite 110B, Anaheim. Mailed deeds go to 601 N. Ross Street, Santa Ana, CA 92701. The 2026 fee is $12.00 for the first page and $3.00 for each additional page, plus $20.00 if no Preliminary Change of Ownership Report is filed with the deed. Our office prepares the deed for $100 per property and you record it.
Usually not on the home you live in. Our deed claims the owner-occupier exemption in Government Code §27388.1(a)(2) on its face, and the Orange County fee schedule requires the exemption to be written on the document or a cover page before it is recorded. A rental condo, a second home or vacant land pays the $75 fee, capped at $225 per transaction. Documentary transfer tax is $0.00 on a deed into your own revocable trust under Revenue and Taxation Code §11930.
In two pieces. The house is deeded to you as trustee like any other Orange County home. The land under it belongs to the Regents of the University of California and is subleased to you through the Irvine Campus Housing Authority, so the sublease is moved by ICHA's own Assignment of Ground Sublease to Trust form. You sign it before a notary and return it with a Preliminary Change of Ownership Report and a $125 check payable to ICHA; ICHA signs it and sends it to the county for recording. ICHA also asks for a copy of your recorded trust deed.
No. The special tax of Community Facilities District 2013-3 stays on the property tax bill no matter who holds title, and the trust deed does not reduce or end it. The City of Irvine says the charge can rise by up to 2% a year, drops by roughly 65% to 82% once the original bonds are repaid, which typically takes 40 years, and continues after that to fund maintenance. Your successor trustee pays it from the trust like the rest of the tax bill.
Yes. A condominium or townhome is deeded into the trust the same way as a detached house, and the association's CC&Rs keep applying to you as trustee. Send the association a copy of the recorded deed so its records and billing show the trust. Association dues, like Mello-Roos taxes, continue after the transfer, and the successor trustee pays them if you become unable to.
The Orange County Assessor treats a death as a change in ownership even when the home stays in the trust, because the beneficial interest passes to the beneficiaries. Its guidance says a change of ownership report should be filed with a copy of the death certificate within 150 days of the date of death. If a child will live in the home, the Proposition 19 claim, form BOE-19-P, goes to the Assessor within three years, and the child must file for the homeowners' exemption within one year.
Checked October 6, 2026. Fees and addresses change; confirm with the office before you file or record.
An attorney-prepared living trust for $400, or $500 for a married couple, signed before any notary in Orange County.
Law Offices of Rozsa Gyene, 3500 W. Olive Ave., Suite 300, Burbank, CA 91505. California State Bar #208356. Read client reviews.
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