[ghaff]

In the US, it's unrealistic to assume there's a canonical federal database which tracks every potential title complication including property tax liens at the local level. In my case, I had a (resolved) issue where the property/house I was buying was a subdivided larger property with an agricultural lien (for an apple orchard) that hadn't been lifted yet.

Titles have a lot of opportunities for complications in many places; there's no simple technology fix.

The insurance is annoying but it's an area that has the potential for really expensive issues.

[vel0city]

I'm definitely no expert on the law in every state, but from the states I know of there are central appraisal districts in charge of real estate tax appraisals. They already have to keep track of ownership of properties and their tax assessments, might as well just expand their domain to also include lien registries as well.

I totally get it would be quite a mess and complication and issue with federalism to have the federal government have a single database, but at least having real databases somewhere that can be publicly queried would be a massive step forward towards making title insurance no longer a thing.

[ghaff]

I'm not opposed to the idea but someone needs to hold the bag when mistakes are made and then you're essentially back to having title insurance in some form even if it's the general taxpayer that is doing the funding.

[vel0city]

A large part of the cost of title insurance is because the current system of tracking such things is such a massive mess. If you massively reduce the likelihood of issues cropping up by having actually good systems in place, you don't need to hire the teams of people to actually look into the properties and find the irregularities and end up still missing things from time to time.

Just query the database. Are there any liens registered? No? It is clear then. Anyone that failed to properly file it in the database is just out of luck.

Insurance on something that constantly sees catastrophe is far more expensive than insurance on something that rarely ever sees problems.

[mschuster91]

> I'm not opposed to the idea but someone needs to hold the bag when mistakes are made

Well, that's obvious: the local authority in charge of record keeping.

[ghaff]

So, no, it's not obvious. Where I live that would be some combination of the county and the the town, given the Registrar of Deeds is a county position and things like property tax and liens are handled at the town level. And the county really just handles some legal matters and doesn't collect any taxes so that sort of means the state.

To quote a previous comment it's all a bit of a mess. "All" you need to do is revamp property record keeping across the US and title insurance would be less of a big deal.

[mschuster91]

The US has a lot of historical baggage that desperately needs a thorough cleanup. There should not be two (or more) "sources of truth" for things affecting a property or alternatively, notaries, lawyers or whatever y'all use to deal with transferring real estate should be mandated to warn their clients if there is more than one place where records are kept.