None of what you state is accurate. What the title -search- will do is show you all of these cases which need to be cleared before insurance is issued.
Title insurance is not about the insurance, it’s about the scan.
4,021 karma · joined May 11, 2017
Title insurance is not about the insurance, it’s about the scan.
The title company won’t issue the insurance if it finds issues like this. It will issue a list of items to clear before they will issue the insurance. It is generally up to the owner (eg the flipper) to cure the issues.
Or if they are beyond on their property taxes? Or going through a messy divorce? Or get an unexpected large medical bill that finalizes as a financial judgement against them?
Clean title from other owners tells you only a limited story. The current owners can completely trash the title but still have an existing mortgage.
The rules in Hunterdon County, NJ are completely different from Detroit, MI and are different from Ossining, NY.
If you paid a guy in CA to run a title search in Hunterdon County, you’d be in a world of hurt. Because most of our records are at various Hall of Records. Even when computerized they are not on the Internet.
Even big places like Suffolk County, NY require a physical trip.
This is why the title agent gets nearly all the money. It is much more about the search than the actual insurance. As the author indicates, it is very rare for anyone to have to pay on a title insurance claim.
You are paying for title insurance mostly to buy the expertise of a local title agent who knows how to look up things locally.
There is no national database that is up to date and trustworthy for this. To be even close to accurate, you need to check the source of truth for property deeds, transactions, liens.
You need to check various level of governments if taxes are up to date. If they are not, there may be an implied lien.
You need to check for financial judgements against the seller, which again may form an implied lien.
Divorces and similar issues mentioned in the article.
I am involved in an in-laws estate where a mom died without a will, a daughter was living in the house for free, and she and her husband had substantial judgements against them (hundreds of thousands of dollars). Resolution has involved the horrors of the surrogate’s court, multiple real estate lawyers, bankruptcy of the daughter, financial negotiations with her creditors and bankruptcy manager, surrogate administrator bonds, and repeated discussions with a bank holding a second mortgage against the property.
This has been ongoing for six years and is finally now almost resolved.
Most transactions will not have any of these problems. But you get title insurance - or run the check locally yourself, at least - because you have no idea who the seller really is and what they may have gotten into.
I have seen far too many teams using Facebook sized solutions for a few thousand users.
I’ve seen developers slowed to an absolute crawl, terrified of shipping code, for a completely secondary operational platform with low volumes and non-critical data. All because the product people were misguided in their mission.
And sadly, I’ve seen teams with almost non-existent security practices and knowledge happily banging out crap in financial services environments.
And I’ve been blessed with teams understanding their position and fully embracing it. Financial services products with quarterly releases that were rock solid and well architected. Batch document processing systems with just a few dozen end users who worked closely with us developers to tune algorithms where sometimes we would ship multiple times in a day and re run batches in production.
To be successful, teams gotta know if you’re at NASA level, or life threatening, or business critical, or somewhat critical, or just nice tooling, plus understand the cash flow / budget situation. As a dev you may not be privy to all that, but strive to know as much of this as you can.
And of course, understand who you users are, and who your customers are, and prioritize accordingly.
Of course, all the processes don’t really protect them, they just get slowed down by a factor of 100 or more.
The successful people take on as many simultaneous projects as they can, because any one project will move at a snails pace.
I have told them tales of working on some internal document processing and classification systems in a fintech a few years ago where we would release to prod multiple times a day to test out different algorithms and approaches.
They flat out think I am lying.
Caveats - you need to ensure your well is deep enough to avoid surface contaminants, ours is about 180 feet deep. Also you need testing for new wells, as an example a few miles from us there is heavy arsenic concentrations that need to be filtered out.
I think people really do underestimate how much FAANG and Silicon Valley practices have skewed the viewpoint of engineers and technology jobs in the United States. Not just in terms of comp, but in terms of architectural and technology approaches as well. Most of what the big guys do works for them at their enormous scales, but are plain dumb for the vast majority of companies and use cases. Yet we are all infected by the FAANG approach.
Consider someone making $60,000 getting a 10% raise vs someone making $200,000 getting a 5% raise.
The first will get $6,000 more per year, the other will get $10,000.
These days you also have to look at total comp as well.
In particular, so many technical leaders work in a vacuum with no context. People joining a company as a technical leader needs to absolutely dig in and understand the existing landscape and processes, and not try to just blindly reuse what they did at the last gig.
Or perhaps getting away from a natural disaster.
This allows for undoing a soft delete and gets rid of soft deleted rows eventually.
I don’t know how this is sustainable given that Manhattan is an island.
Their salaries are no where near those of Western Europe or the US, and not because of lack of ability but rather more macroeconomic issues in the regions. But a lot of technology solutions utilized by the world quietly get built out of there.
I haven’t used C++ in quite a while, but aren’t templates a big part of this issue?
Our politicians are bought cheap.
But the “what” and the “why” seem to be mostly implied. There are mentions of quality and security, but it is really unclear. I don’t know what this company is trying to actually achieve. As an aside, lists like this are intriguing to me because they seem to value uptime over capability. I get the impression they would be perfectly happy shipping nothing for long periods.
Add in global warming bringing excessive intense rain storms to soften up the ground, and wind storms happening several times a year, and the result is we lose power at least once or twice a year. Some neighbors in very heavily wooded roads lose power 5+ times a year.
Later in life I likewise got into hiking prior to GPS being widely available. That really motivated me to be aware of my environment and directions.
I am not perfect at it and can get disoriented if I’m not careful, but generally speaking I almost always have a background thread in my head keeping track of where I am and my orientation when driving.
This came in incredibly handy a few months ago when my phone died and I was picking up my son at a friend’s house an hour away I had only visited once before. It took a bit but I was able to find the house again with zero electronic aids.