Hacker News Reader

Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

When you buy a house, your name and the purchase price are public information. Any one at any time can look up who owns a house, how much they paid for it, and how much they pay in property tax every year.

I get a ton of spam because of this. However, I'd rather have this system than one in which all the owners are secret. I've had to look up owner information before to contact owners of various properties, and having that hidden would have made that task impossible.

You can hide the ownership information of a house, if you pay extra money, by hiring a lawyer to create an entity and put the entity on the property, but then the lawyer has to put their address, and forward any requests on to you, just like the whois privacy folks.

I think it is a good thing that every domain has valid contact info.

View on HN

Not in my country unless you have a damn good reason to get that info.

The only way to get access to someone's address or phone number is to show up at the local community office and provide sufficient information (which means name + any previous address or known phone number registered with the office)

I think the same should go for domains. Unless you have a good reason (which IMO means spam complain, journalism or legal contact) you shouldn't be able to get any way to contact me. And for the above I have an imprint too which is protected against scrapers and spammers as best as I can unlike the WHOIS.

> However, I'd rather have this system than one in which all the owners are secret.

I don't mean to be cynical, but isn't this system also the one in which some people simply register their houses under a shell company?

Yes, but at least the shell company forwards on the messages. And most people don't do it because it's a hassle.

And you lose a 250-500k capital gains exemption if you sell the house and it's not owned & lived in by you directly AFAIK

The issue with this system is it also lets people look up where you live by name alone, which can be bad if you want to own your house and have a stalker problem. The map works 2 ways.

Not true with a revocable trust, which costs under $1000 to establish and provides all the same benefits of owning the real estate directly without disclosing ownership.

Disclaimer: Applies primarily to IL and FL, not an attorney, nor your attorney.

If you do that in CA can you “sell” control of the trust to circumvent reassessment of the real estate taxes after a sale?

My apologies, I’m only familiar with Illinois and Florida real estate law. A CA attorney should be able to answer that with a short, no cost phone consultation (if a trust can’t support such an arrangement, an LLC might).

If a company or other entity is owned by a single person and just owns a single piece of property, this does not work and California will not let the prop 13 tax rate stay with the company. You are obviously trying to cheat to get around the law. As there are more owners of the company and the company has more diverse holdings, California is less likely to insist on resetting the assessed value of the real estate owned by the company upon sale. One REIT buying another REIT is fine. Like many laws, one does not really know what they mean on the edges until you do something and are taken to court.

Isn't that exactly the same as PrivacyGuard or other WHOIS anonymizing services? If anything, it reinforces the analogy even more.

Is that a US thing? I understand that having some registry with this information is needed (but maybe not with details down to taxation) but... having it behind some officials "firewall" would solve that?

What problem are you trying to solve? The problems that having an open land and property tax register solves are problems like finding fraud, money laundering, tax cheating, better valuation of properties for bank loan purposes, and so forth.

Why would YOU have to do it? For me it's enough that officials have access to this information (and common folks when requested, but with valid motivation). And as a result I don't have problems with my identity being out in the open (and I don't get a single spamy mail)

The reason this is done in public is because plenty of fraud happens when only officials can get access to property ownership and tax info -- even in countries that are relatively less corrupt.

Also, the bit about mortgages means that mortgages rates are lower when appraisals are more accurate; the largest inputs to home value appraisals in the US are sales data and tax data.

But the thing is - not only officials can get that data. Its simply not that easily available (so you can't harvest it like mails on the Web)

As for house market - in other counties (where dará is more hidden) it still works. and as far as I know housing market in the US is quite... weird, so it seems this data doesn't help that much?

A housing market that's full of fraud and that has extra-high interest rates still "works". I don't think you're understanding my point at all, or maybe you don't mind fraud.

But in any case, those are the problems that transparency are trying to help solve.

You seem to be repeating the talking point without addressing the counter-argument. Why is a system where people can access that data, just with a couple of roadblocks to avoid mass harvesting, not enough to avoid fraud?

I'm just describing the problems that the current system appears to be designed to solve. If you want to design a new system, great, have at it. I don't have an opinion about that, other than that you probably should try to solve the same problems.

>I think it is a good thing that every domain has valid contact info.

Does your "valid" include domain registrars that provide WHOIS protection that includes forwarding messages to the protected owner?

And, honest question, why do you think that domains should have contact info?

off the top of my head, valid DMCA takedowns?

When I used to work in security, I used Whois every day. In many cases it was to notify a domain owner that their domain had been compromised and was being used for spam. I also used it a lot to track down bad actors because most of them are dumb and don’t hide their Whois.

In germany there is an imprint requirement so you'll always have a contact point for these things.

Unlike WHOIS it's on a website so you can protect this information much more easily from scraping and spamming.

Not all domains have public websites.

If those create any abuse then you can still contact the registrar.

From what I understand the eventual plan for WHOIS to only allow access if there is truly legitimate interest. Everything else can be filtered over the registrar.

That's where WHOIS protection comes in handy. If you don't want to get even more spam (the imprint has to be clear text, no obfuscation so gets spammed a lot) but a website that could target Germans (or you're in Germany), you'll quickly get costly letters from specialised lawyers. Having Whois protection usually helps, they tend to give up if they can't get your address easily.

Some minor Obfuscation should be okay "mail at example dot com" => "mail@example.com" and similar.

Plus I'm fairly certain providing temporary mail addresses (with decent lifetime) would also be okay.

Specialised Lawyer isn't quite right, a business that competes with you needs to file a complaint (IIRC from law course).

No, minor obfuscation is not ok. The same as a picture can be a problem for blind people, your example can be an issue for people not speaking english (it's a German law). I wouldn't take any risks with these laws.

My sites are all dual-language so I don't see that as a problem.

> When you buy a house, your name and the purchase price are public information. Any one at any time can look up who owns a house, how much they paid for it, and how much they pay in property tax every year.

Uh, really? Where?

It's a US or at least California thing. In many countries this is not reality.

It is the same in Washington state, and I suspect most other states also make this information available. I believe it is required because the taxing authority data is considered public information.

PA, checking in. My county has a website where you search the address, and get back the owners, acreage, square footage, assessed value (land and building(s)), and last sale price and date.

UK too.

Def true in Canada.

I know that this is all managed by a government department called the "Land Registry" in the UK.

If this is true in Europe, I'm curious what the implications are w.r.t. GDPR.

Probably very little. The data will be being made public under a law mandating that, and the GDPR allows for that:

> Processing shall be lawful [...if...] processing is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation to which the controller is subject

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-6-gdpr/

EDIT: nevermind, misread the context.

I believe the parent is talking about the example of a land ownership database.

Oh, oops, you're right.

It's not true where I am in Europe, this sort of info is accessible to government employees only.

There is no reason for anyone to contact me outside of methods I publish.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com