[nine_k]

I wonder why a commercial entity that registers ownership / titles for free, and bills for checking, did not spring up. Clearly there is moneyed demand for certainty about title rights, and if you can provide certainty (because the last deal was registered with you), it may be a more desirable product than mere insurance.

[wrs]

It’s turtles all the way down, though — how do you know that last deal had clear title? At some point you’re going to want insurance anyway.

In any case, the US system is already that the government records ownership (not for free, but for a small recording fee) and the title company charges for checking, and for insurance in case they get it wrong.

As just one example of how it can go wrong, here in Seattle it’s common to find out your lot is nine inches smaller than you thought because surveying technology is a lot better now than it was when your deed was written in 1908.

[ghaff]

It's complicated. I live on a parcel of a very old property by US standards (early 1800s) that was subdivided shortly before I bought it. Without going into all the details, my neighbor who also lives on a parcel of the original land had a survey done and it turned out there were some significant incursions into other properties.

And we're not talking inches.

But, yeah, even inches (or any liens) can be an issue when it comes time to sell.

[anjel]

The trick with title theft is they target property not closely watched as the author noted, but also worth roughly the legal costs the rightful owner will incur undoing the fradulent transfer.

Prison is crime university and ID theft and related crimes are high yield low risk crimes.

The system doesn't care and such title thefts have been increasing for 15-20 years already

[bluGill]

That depends on the state. I live in Iowa where the state records the transaction and verifies everyone's identity. Almost nobody has title insurance because there is nothing to insure. Every other state I've lived in though isn't as good about checking ID and you need title insurance (who is very good about checking id)

[skissane]

The system in Iowa, is instead of getting title insurance from a private insurer (as is standard in the US), you get it from a state government agency (Iowa Title Guaranty) which has a legal monopoly on all title insurance in the state. But people in Iowa say they don't have "title insurance", because the term is defined to mean private insurance, not the insurance issued by the state government. A condition of the state-issued title insurance is you need to provide an attorney's legal opinion that there are no issues with the title, and then the insurance covers the risk the attorney did a bad job, or failed to notice some obscure issue or hidden issue. But this is different from a true Torrens title system, in that title registration is not (near-)conclusive evidence of legal title, only de facto presumptive.

A number of US states historically had Torrens title, but most have repealed it, effectively converting Torrens titles to non-Torrens. Illinois had it – only in Cook County – until it was repealed in 1992. California abolished it in 1955. Virginia abolished it in 2019. Washington state abolished it in 2022-2023.

The big advantage of Torrens title is that it eliminates the need for title insurance, or at least makes it much cheaper. (You can still buy title insurance in Australia, but the Torrens title system significantly reduces the risk to the insurer, resulting in lower premiums–the risk it is covering is not that you don't have title to the property at all, rather risks such as the boundary fences being in the wrong places.) But in those US states which had it, title insurers wouldn't give you any discount for having it, and banks would still insist on title insurance to lend, nullifying the primary practical advantage of the Torrens system–the end result was your property was under a different title system which many didn't understand, which could make real estate transactions appear more complex, discourage buyers and lenders, etc. This resulted in political pressure from landowners on the system to be allowed to move off it, which is what resulted in it being repealed.

I think the US state in which Torrens would be most likely to be successful would be Iowa, since private title insurance is banned there. However, repeated attempts to introduce Torrens in Iowa failed, because the attorneys who investigate the validity of titles saw it as a threat to their livelihoods, and they successfully lobbied the state legislature against the idea.

[sidewndr46]

But how do they verify your identity? Most places I've lived used nearly useless forms of identity verification

[bluGill]

That is more or less how title insurance started back in the day.

In 1800 land was sold in person only by people who knew each other, in front of other witnesses who knew everybody in town. It worked great, which is why some states (I assume like CT) never bothered with a registry. In the mid 1800s as land out west started opening up for settlement (skip the whole bad treatment of the natives) investors "out east" wanted to invest in land and ran into a problem: they didn't want to go out to the land, but they knew scams existed so they started hiring trusted people to travel instead and verify they property owner was really the person they were buying from. Some states have a registry and so you don't need that, the state tracks owners and verifies the people buying/selling really are who they say they are.