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Comment by dkarp | Hacker News Reader

Something that always seems wild to me in England is that there is no exact record of property boundaries. Specifically, in England and Wales there's usually no record of the exact boundary between two properties and who owns the hedge, wall, tree or fence between 2 properties[1].

There are only "title plans" held by HM Land Registry, that may or may not include information about who owns the wall and exactly what delineates the property line. If you want to see the "title plan", you even have to pay a small fee each time for the privilege. I can't understand why they would do that except to slow the flow of information.

I recently looked on US property websites and was surprised that the map showed the exact edge of the property as well as every other property around it. That just isn't possible in England. No such map seems to exist unless I've understood things incorrectly.

1: https://www.gov.uk/your-property-boundaries#legalboundaries

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> I recently looked on US property websites and was surprised that the map showed the exact edge of the property as well as every other property around it

The US does not have land registration. So, while it's nice that you got a web site with a map, that's worth almost nothing in court.

In contrast the small fee to the Land Registry buys you paperwork that a court of law is compelled to accept as the last word on who owns that land.

In the US if you're absolutely sure you own your plot, but alas somebody else has paperwork which they say proves they own it, you're looking at an expensive court case to find out who is right.

Which is of course why the US doesn't have a land registry, the lawyers and insurers lobby to ensure they get to keep charging people for the peace of mind that they're not going to wake up to find somebody else owns their home.

For those curious about how someone else might acquire that paperwork without provable fraud, one way is for someone who doesn’t actually hold title to will it to that someone else. Obviously the dead person can’t be convicted of fraud and the beneficiary can easily claim good faith. In some states adverse possession under color of title[1] like this has a significantly shorter period (7 years instead of 20 for some) before legal ownership can be claimed, presumably because it’s assumed the squatter acted in good faith. I wouldn’t be surprised if UK law is similar.

[1] https://wealthhow.com/difference-between-color-of-title-clai...

I am not an expert in any sense, but adverse possession definitely does come from England and originate in common law.

And this is why most (all) sales in the US include both lender and buyer title insurance. So if some court case comes up, the bank / buyer are protected.

99.999% of sales nothing happens, and the title insurance company gets $800 for doing nothing.

Quit the good gig if you ask me.

Probably kind of messy if one does go to court for being forged or some such though.

I assume:

1.) There is some cost associated with doing the title search which is probably fairly manual

2.) When something does go wrong, it's expensive

3.) If it really were a license to print money, I would, perhaps naively, expect more competition to drive prices down

> If it really were a license to print money, I would, perhaps naively, expect more competition to drive prices down

I would think the boringness of working in title insurance suffices to restrict the supply.

It's not really like that though.

Ask 100 people walking down the street who their preferred title insurance company is. no one will have one.

So at closing, usually it's the real estate agent who picks the title insurance company. So they do things like snacks and fancy coffee to real estate agents as you close, nothing to make the product better or cheaper.

In my city, the title company steered people closing at their location to a company that they 100% owned and charged inflated prices

https://www.housingwire.com/articles/41408-cfpb-slaps-meridi...

(post lawsuit, the only change as far as I now is a 1 page disclaimer that they own the title insurance company they are sending you to).

Many cities have only 1 title insurance options. Bigger might have 2-3.

https://archive.curbed.com/2018/2/26/17017142/title-insuranc...

Title insurance doesn’t even necessarily cover property border disputes. It can but it depends and some title insurances exclude it.

I see, so my assumption was wrong. I've just gone on Zillow to investigate a little more and they don't state anywhere where their "lot lines" come from. However, it seems to vary by location.

Some places don't seem to have any lot lines, others have some properties marked and others have every property clearly marked.

I'd be interested to know where they get that data from. Is it some public source or a proprietary database? Do some states have a list and others not?

If you want to see a real world example of freely available, exact and digital government land/building registry (including ownerships etc!), you can look at the Czech "Cadastre of Immovables": https://www.ikatastr.cz/ (zoom to street level to see plots). It covers every centimeter of the country.

Most jurisdictions (county usually) have publicly available GIS databases. However, these are secondary to the recorder of deeds which will contain the legal description of boundaries. The deeds are more accurate, but less precise than the GIS boundaries indicate.

Some towns provide parcel maps, often GIS maps, are those also unofficial?

As far as the courts are concerned, yes.

I was under the impression that the records at the county recorder or assessor’s office was definitive, excluding cases where the boundaries changed because of land usage and the like (ie, your neighbor built on your property and you ignored it, now he claims he owns it).

In Texas, as I understand it, the deed is the definitive document and need not be recorded with the county. However, recording it is required by lenders and generally a good idea---in case of multiple deeds showing up, the recorded one would take precedence. One exception is that, if you wanted to leave your property to someone on your death without it going through the probate process, you could execute a deed and not register it. When you die, the receiver registers the deed and everyone is happy.

This is state by state. In Iowa (and only Iowa to my knowledge) the state does have land registration which is worth something in court. In Iowa when property changes hand the legal record changes in a way that is easy to verify and holds up in court. Attempts at fraud are rejected by the state because they can and do verify that the seller has legal right to the property. If someone else has paperwork saying they own your land not court fight is needed because the state holds the final word on paperwork. (even then I suppose you can get identify theft fraud to transfer ownership, but this is harder to pull off than writing up a fictional title)

Even in states without the above, there are local records of ownership that you can bring to court that can be brought to court to prove who is right. Someone is going to be paying the land taxes and that is strong evidence of ownership in court. Banks require title insurance because the title insurance company will check the local records to verify that who you are buying from has rights to sell. However this will be an expensive court case as you say. Fortunately such things are rare these days.

Iowa has their system because about the time they became a state there was a big problem with fraud where someone would sell fake titles to land to multiple people. So Iowa put in place a system to stop it. Other states started when such fraud was rare and didn't need it, or started after title insurance was invented to take care of the fraud problems.

(Note, others have talked about squatters rights - I didn't touch on that, but it does exist in some cases)

Torrens title? Or are you talking about a different system?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrens_title

Good question, I do not know. Your wiki link doesn't list Iowa, but I don't know if it is because Iowa is somehow different, or if just they editors didn't know.

Yet the government knows who is the owner for tax-charging purposes.

So why would that record not count?

The taxpayer and property owner can be different parties -- for example, in the US, a commercial property that is rented to a tenant under a triple-net lease.

This is incorrect: it varies by state. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrens_title#United_States

(For example, in Massachusetts, where I live, you can look up any property on the Registry of Deeds: https://www.masslandrecords.com/)

Didn't know things were online in Mass. (Although, at least in my case, they seem to have images of the deed text but not the parcel drawing.)

Anecdotes from the US:

1) When I moved a couple of years ago, I discovered that the deed to our house had a typo. It defined the property we owned by referencing a map, which was on file with the County Register of Deeds. Except, when the deed cited the map, it mis-typed the page number the map was supposed to be on such that it referenced the map for a totally different property. The prior owner's deed had the same typo, back a couple of generations. The sale nearly fell through as the buyer's lawyer argued that it would be risky for them to buy the property given the typo and that a title insurance company might even refuse to insure the sale over the issue (not sure how much of that was real vs. theatrics). In the end, our lawyer tracked down an owner several generations prior in another part of the state, and sent a paralegal to his current house to have him sign new paperwork clearing the matter up.

2) A while back, I got a little too interested in the history of a local state park, which was a farming community before it was a park. I found some of the original deeds where the property was sold from the original farmers to the US Federal Government, and then to the State. The deeds defined the property by saying things like "beginning at a holly bush on the bank of Crabtree Creek, and extending for 500 yards north to a rock." A holly bush? Which holly bush? What about when it dies or somebody cuts it down? Which rock? The woods are full of rocks! In a world of Google Maps and GPS, it's wild to think that land used to be bought and sold this way, which apparently worked well enough for the time.

GPS has its own shortcomings as well due to continental drift!

"The Australian continent, perched on the planet’s fastest moving tectonic plate, is drifting at about seven centimetres a year to the northeast."

https://theconversation.com/australia-on-the-move-how-gps-ke...

My brother tried to by a house last October and only just gave up this month after two different lawyers were unable to establish the man selling it was the owner. He'd lived there for 60+ years though and no one else is claiming ownership.

And worse - not all properties are even registered: there's no complete cadastral survey. It's now compulsory to register land on sale, but there are lots of pieces that haven't been sold in decades or centuries.

This can result in some quite odd outcomes. The road outside my house, for example, isn't owned by the local council like most roads, but is 'unadopted'. It's probably owned by the descendents of the builder who laid out the road and built the houses in the 1840s, but as it would be a liability rather than an asset (and was probably forgotten about shortly after the last house was sold in any case) nobody knows who that is.

There are ways around this. We have specialised title insurance to cover the risk that the road isn't actually a right of way, and there are provisions in English & Welsh law that give responsibility for road maintenance to the frontagers (like me) if the road owner isn't known. But it's added a surprising amount of friction. If there were a 'register or lose it' provision then it's likely something sane could be worked out once the land reverted to the crown. But as it is, we're in this weird semi-purgatory forever. No way of claiming adverse possession over a road, sadly...

Always seemed odd to me that there's no way to compel a local authority to take ownership and responsibiltiy for an unadopted road.

AIUI they (often?) will take it over, but only after it's been made up to the same standard that a new road would need to be for them to adopt it. Which is quite the undertaking, especially when you need to persuade each individual frontager to cough up for the building works.

It's not adverse possession, but does your jurisdiction not recognize implied easements?

Easements don't change ownership of the underlying land, they just establish a right to use/control the land in a particular way. Road access would (in many jurisdictions) be protected by an easement implied by necessarity (because access is a necessity) or an easement implied by past usage (analogous to adverse possession).

It does, and it's very likely that we'd eventually win in court if it became an issue. But AIUI, we'd need testimony to 20 years of continuous access as of right to our house (not any of the others on the street). As a newcomer, that's not entirely trivial - the people we bought it from were only here 8 years, and I think we'd need to go another two owners back to get the full 20. And in any case the court case (and inevitable buggeration in the lead up to it) would be expensive and unpleasant.

Anyway, the building society (mortgage holder) wanted better security than that, so insurance it is.

I wonder if aerial photos would show cars parked and help prove it.

Most roads are actually not owned by the local authority. Adoption means tthey take over responsibility but the freehold remains with the original owner. Title plans are drawn to the assumed highway rather than the original ownership. The definitive information is most likely to be in conveyance documents.

> If you want to see the "title plan", you even have to pay a small fee each time for the privilege. I can't understand why they would do that except to slow the flow of information.

I suspect they're trying to thread the needle between "People's home addresses are private" and "Who owns what land is public"

Right now (AFAIK) there isn't any public database I can search to find all the houses owned by Boris Johnson.

If you are a conveyancing solicitor, you can subscribe to the land registry database and just search it like any other with no need to pay per search, as far as I know.

The reason for the payment is that the Land Registry is required to be self funding. Actually I thought that they might have been incorporated as a private company already and sold off but not sure about that.

I think The IRS does as Boris got hit with tax when his mum died and he got hit with US tax.

Amazingly the HM Land Registry [0] doesn't actually identify the ownership of all land in the UK. Specifically, land only needs to be registered when it is sold or transferred in certain ways - which puts it on the system, as it were. But there is no legal compulsion to register land that doesn't meet these transfer criteria, and such land won't be returned in a public search of the Land registry, especially for land that was last transferred before 1990 [1] when the current registration triggers were defined.

[Edit] Actually establishing who does own England is a somewhat challenging topic; see [2] for an example of one such attempt, and the list of sources that needed to be consulted.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HM_Land_Registry

[1] https://www.gov.uk/registering-land-or-property-with-land-re...

[2] https://map.whoownsengland.org/

> There are only "title plans" held by HM Land Registry, that may or may not include information about who owns the wall and exactly what delineates the property line.

Yeah the UK has been introducing a land registry, but as of 2019, 15% of the land was still not registered. https://hmlandregistry.blog.gov.uk/2019/05/30/registering-la...

In continental europe, Napoleon can be attributed to many of the land registries, but England never got conquered by him :).

It's the UK - nothing is that simple.

HM Land Registry is for England and Wales, Scotland has its own land registry (indeed a completely separate legal system) and NI does its own thing as well.

> I can't understand why they would do that except to slow the flow of information.

To cover costs. Accessing those records costs somebody’s time and so unless HM Land Registry eats the cost, the interested party covers the cost. Same reason you pay for passes on government transportation or pay filing fees in court or for a driver’s license.

In Ontario Canada, we digitized the system and then sold it off to cover a deficit.

You can still pay the legislated $6 or whatever for each individual search, but they can slice and dice it and charge whatever they like for useful access to data only they have.

Now someone else can make a 10% return on equity at the public’s expense instead of just issuing a bond at 3%.

We like to sell off monopolies and maintain them here...

Australia has the same approach to selling off monopolies. Nice little earners.

> Specifically, in England and Wales there's usually no record of the exact boundary between two properties

I think that the logical explanation for this is that it just isn't important enough to record the exact boundary between two properties.

In the US, most of the land was (dubiously) obtained by the government from the natives, divided into large tracts, sold to land speculators who then divided it into smaller tracts, who then sold it to individuals and families far, far away from the land. The owner then had to go find it. This system pretty much required exact boundaries be known from the start.

In the modern US, most land boundaries aren't super important anymore. Want to build a shed in your backyard? Your local zoning rules probably say it has to be 10-15 feet away from the property boundary. If you build it 10-15 feet away from what you think is the property boundary, nobody is going to send in the surveyors to make sure and then tell you to move your shed 1.5 feet to the left.

The situations in the US where the exact boundaries are needed are probably the same situations where the exact boundaries are needed in the UK.

Property disputes cause huge amounts of distress and financial cost in England, partly because ownership of boundaries is unclear. Some people spend years and tens of thousands of pounds arguing over that 1 foot strip of land.

For the other stuff we have "party wall" laws which help a bit.

> Want to build a shed in your backyard? Your local zoning rules probably say it has to be 10-15 feet away from the property boundary.

In England you can build a shed right up to the boundary. Potentially you can have bits (like guttering) that overhang the boundary. I think this site is a nice explanation of how complex it can get: https://www.lyonsdavidson.co.uk/can-homeowners-overhanging-e...

In the US we also have right-of-ways granted to utilities, and while they usually work with you to avoid damage to structures and landscape, they don't have to. There may also be separate mineral rights (if I find gold ore on my property it doesn't belong to me) and water rights (I cannot legally collect the runoff from my roof in a barrel).

I suppose it's been technically hard to do - plans in the registry office aren't going to be accurate enough to distinguish a 1 ft strip. Maybe on a good aerial photo you could mark it? In Thailand they put concrete maker stakes in the ground with serial numbers on.

I have a metal stake at the corner of my property. It is possible for me to dig that stake up and move it. Thus there needs to be a record of where that stake should be so that if I do such a thing I can be caught.

In the Thai system the distances between the stakes are measured and recorded on the registry document.

And a lot of the boundary features predate accurate mapping. It could be a 500 year old ditch with a hedge planted on one side that is cut back every year. To draw a line hou would have to make an arbitrary decision that ignores the practicalities of hedges and ditches.

Also being able to locate things to a global reference system is a very new thing. Before GPS everything had to be measured relative to something else on the ground. That was never perfectly accurate and could have absolute errors of a few metres.

I was thinking in the UK there are usually historic walls, hedges etc. that form the boundaries. In Thailand the land is often just a patch of jungle that nothing has been built on before so I guess the marking stakes are a solution to that.

> Property disputes cause huge amounts of distress and financial cost in England, partly because ownership of boundaries is unclear. Some people spend years and tens of thousands of pounds arguing over that 1 foot strip of land.

How frequent is that? Based on the original link, it appears that there is a process in place for when disputes arise.

Disputes happen in the US too. We have legal descriptions that exactly specify property boundaries, but converting them from paper to dirt also costs a lot of money. And land shifts! A survey from 200 years ago might not be accurate anymore!

EDIT - your link says "These days, it is rare to obtain planning permission to build right up to the boundary"

My main argument is that the US and the UK have kind of settled on the same solution, which is to try to avoid situations where you need to know the boundary exactly. In both countries, if the exact boundary is important, you can pay lots of money to find out (and it will take a long time too).

I think that the "exactness" of the American property system gives people a false sense of precision that doesn't actually exist in real life. I live in the US state of Illinois. In the southern half of the state, the legal definition of the state (as defined by the US Congress when the state was created) is based on 3 different rivers (the Mississippi, the Ohio, and the Wabash). That was a long time ago, and now the river banks have shifted a little bit. So you have parts of Illinois west of the Mississippi River, parts of Missouri east of the Mississippi River, and even parts of Indiana that are west of the Wabash River. Legally - what is written down as law - this is not possible!

> EDIT - your link says "These days, it is rare to obtain planning permission to build right up to the boundary"

Not all structures need planning permission. Someone can build a 2 metre wall right on the boundary. https://www.planningportal.co.uk/info/200130/common_projects...

Furthermore, things that are non-issues between amiable neighbors on large parcels of land can easily become expensive nuisances when it comes time to sell.

For example, I have a dumpster that's probably sticking a couple feet into my neighbor's property. It's absolutely not a big deal, especially given that it's logically on "my land" given it's on my side of a driveway. But when the property was split up before I bought it, a survey line was drawn in an easy but not especially logical way. I'd never build a shed there because that would be an issue I'd have to deal with in the event of either property being sold.

In the US we saw the beginnings of the problem of inexact boundaries in England, so we carefully surveyed most of the country after getting land from the natives (I won't touch that issue). In the far east cost things were not done well (nw to the old stump that rotted away 200 year ago...), but most of the rest of the country has land borders known to within a few cm.

England land dates back to pre-history in some cases, so it isn't a surprise that it is hard to pin down where some boundaries are. It is also hard to fix this when two different owners disagree - someone will be screwed out of land they think they own (or given a fence they don't want to maintain)

> In the modern US, most land boundaries aren't super important anymore.

This depends enormously on density, lot size, and land value. My town has recently updated zoning to allow the construction of accessory dwelling units ("backyard cottages"), but whether a specific lot has a room for one often comes down to less than a foot. They are definitely going to require you to bring out a surveyor before you can get a construction permit.

In Scotland if you build a property on someone else's land then they own the property. They are under no obligation to inform you either - so if you decide to build a windmill on top of a hill and then afterwards discover that the hill actually belongs to someone else then you are out of luck!

I think it's a good system. It ensures you as the party that wants to build do your due diligence and/or make sure everyone is on board.

It can cause a lot of grief if you're lawyer hasn't done all the possible checks as to who owns the land and you find you have been living in a new house that actually belongs to someone else...

And people wonder why conveyancing of houses is often so cheap!

NB Of course, in such circumstances I'm sure you'd have a valid claim against your solicitor who did the conveyancing - but I doubt if that would make up for the misery involved.

Here in Lithuania it's the complete opposite, but given all ownership records are max 30 years old, it makes it a lot easier :-) A lot of GIS data is open to the public (no registration required) such as boundaries and utilities. There's even a mobile app.

I am somewhat surprised how much data is open, it even shows you substations. If you wanted to sabotage the electricity supply for an area it would show you how to do it :-)

https://regia.lt/map/regia2

(Turn on different layers in the menu on mobile)

> If you want to see the "title plan", you even have to pay a small fee each time for the privilege

You also get a copy when buying the house, as well as any covenants and details about any fences/walls etc that you have to maintain (either individually or with others)

Usually it just gets passed down in the buyer/seller questionnaire - until someone has a falling out with the neighbour then it all goes horribly wrong!

But yea, it is strange that we haven't started to do it more accurately, especially for new builds.

> it is strange that we haven't started to do it more accurately, especially for new builds.

Last time the surveyor came out he found the buried property stacks, dropped his GPS tripod right on top, and that was the property line. This was a house built in the 80s. I'm guessing each county in each state has a method for marking and surveying property.

> If you want to see the "title plan", you even have to pay a small fee each time for the privilege. I can't understand why they would do that except to slow the flow of information.

HM Land Registry is one of the few government agencies that turns a profit.

I have a survey from my county office that shows everything. It was done by the previous owner but the county retains records. It shows retaining walls, 3 different types of fences, and it includes the different types of property markers they found and where.

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