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Comment by tialaramex | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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...

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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

As far as the courts are concerned, yes.

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.

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.

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