A Sea Cliff house at 250 32nd Ave. has become the subject of a civil ownership fight after eight deeds were recorded over roughly 14 months, according to The San Francisco Standard. The dispute involves Brandon Aadee and Diana Peng, while the property’s prior ownership and the authority behind later transfers remain contested.
The Standard reported that a July 2025 filing identified Aadee as the owner after a purported transfer from Wei Wang, who had purchased the property with Xiangdong Guo in 2013. Aadee later said a deed transferring the house to Peng was forged; Peng disputed that Aadee had ever been the legitimate owner. Several notaries named in the recorded instruments told the Standard they had not performed the notarizations attributed to them, and one said a document had been altered after notarization. Those allegations have not been resolved by a final court ruling.
The filing of a deed is not the same as a government determination that the deed is genuine or that its named grantor had authority to transfer the property. The California Department of Real Estate says county recorders generally do not verify the “validity, authenticity or legitimacy” of documents before recording them. That means a document can appear in the public record while its legal effect remains subject to a court challenge.
What the city is asking a court to decide
San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu has sued Aadee and Peng, seeking to void the disputed deeds, the Standard reported. The case may address which instruments, if any, created a valid transfer of title. Until that process produces a ruling, the recorded sequence alone does not establish who legally owns the house.
The property has also drawn substantial municipal attention. The Standard reported more than 30 police dispatches to the address over two years, 18 complaints through the city’s 311 system since 2023, and no arrests or charges connected to the dispute. The house is vacant and damaged, but the reporting does not establish that every incident at the address resulted from the deed filings or identify a final criminal finding.
A tax auction is not a completed sale
The parcel carries more than $324,000 in unpaid property taxes, dating back five years, and the Treasurer and Tax Collector has submitted it for a municipal auction with a reported minimum bid of $500,000 and a possible sale in 2027, according to the Standard. The city’s tax-sale process is designed primarily to collect taxes unpaid for at least five years, according to the San Francisco Treasurer and Tax Collector.
Being listed does not mean the house has already changed hands. The Treasurer and Tax Collector says auction properties are sold as-is and without a government guarantee of title or condition. The agency also says an owner’s right to redeem the property revives if it is not sold, while parcels that receive no bids may be offered again at the agency’s discretion. Those rules make the proposed auction a separate process from the court fight over the deeds.
A broader fraud problem, but limited local evidence
The Sea Cliff case cannot by itself show how common deed fraud is in San Francisco. Nationally, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center recorded more than $275 million in reported losses involving real-estate-related fraud and at least 12,368 victims in 2025, according to figures reported by the National Association of Realtors. Those figures are reported complaints and losses, not a count of proven cases, and they do not measure the frequency of unauthorized deed recordings in San Francisco.
Property owners can inspect San Francisco’s recorded-document history through the Assessor-Recorder’s Records Manager. The Assessor-Recorder says the system covers official records recorded after 1990, but searches must be made by names, document numbers, document types or parcel numbers rather than by street address. That tool can reveal what has been recorded; it does not decide whether a disputed document is authentic or legally effective.
