That doesn't require a distributed ledger, just a database. In the UK it costs £3 and is searchable online.
If it costs $300 then that is because someone wants it to cost that much.
My short text didn't give enough context. In the USA, that $$$ isn't really for the "search"; it's to pay for the "title insurance". That title company insures that the buyer is getting a "clean title" with no conflicting claims of ownership from others he doesn't know about. The "search" is just one component of labor of what you're paying for. (I looked at my mortgage documents again and my title insurance actually cost $4000.)
With a distributed ledger for property deeds and title transfers, that was used by say -- 1 million people -- that essentially means you have 1 million "witnesses" to the transactions. Therefore "title insurance" becomes superfluous.
I'm not predicting that DLT would be used for property records but proposing that hypothetical scenario as something more realistic than bitcoin replacing the Euro/USD.
That would also solve the problem. Once again it seems like this is a social issue not a technical issue.
The governments (e.g. county courthouses) do store copies of the documents such as deeds and transfers. They stamp them with their seal so in that sense, they do "hold the authoritative title records".
However, there is no computer database with rows for all real estate that has a binary column called "CLEAN_TITLE" with values TRUE/FALSE.
Therefore, the actual state of a "clean title" isn't a flag but a case-by-case determination based on documents analysis. What an employee from a title company will often do is actually drive down to the court house and sit there looking through document archives to trace the chain of sales. This also includes looking at microfiche films[1] if the courthouse hasn't migrated all their images to electronic image databases. If the worker feels confident there are no outstanding claims, the title company can issue "insurance" that the title is clean. (Occasionally, the determination was wrong and the title company has to pay out the insurance because of their mistake.)
If the property gets sold again, another title company worker may do the same redundant "documents analysis". (Because new claims can be recorded against the deed since the last time the property was sold.) Yes, it's a really inefficient process!
Conceivably, a buyer could buy property without title insurance but since most people require loans, a bank won't lend money unless it has assurance the title is clean (because that property is the bank's collateral so it has to have confidence that nobody else has claims that supersedes the bank's.)
Could the governments create a convenient centralized database to solve those issues? Yes. But some people might prefer to have a distributed ledger to bypass the government holding those records. (E.g. the courthouse charges $20 to "record deed documents" or "$1 per page for copies of deeds", etc). The distributed ledger could theoretically not require those fees or make them very small.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=microfiche+reader&source=lnm...
Sure, in a limited sense... every distributed ledger use case can be replaced with a centralized database. The reason people would choose a distributed solution is to bypass the controls of the centralized authority. Similar reasons that bitcoin proponents prefer it over centralized fiat government currency.
Whether those distributed reasons are cost-effective or sensible remains to be seen. Who knows, maybe distributed ledgers will become so mainstream that it will be the county governments themselves that seed the real estate blockchain so they don't have to bother administering a central db.
(To be clear, I'm not trying to convince anyone of switching to distributed ledgers but laying out possible use cases.)
Normally, to verify ownership, each transaction is reviewed to verify that they follow a direct chain back to the property's origin.
Compare that to a blockchain, where an algorithm which all involved parties must agree to, traces ownership through each transaction involving the property back to its origin.
Both have situations that result in conflicts that have to be resolved, whether by algorithm or in a court room.