The last time I bought a house (this was in California) I read the title insurance policy (as the author says, it's short). Turns out it protects my claim in perpetuity meaning that when I sell the property I am still covered against any claims later brought by the buyer or their insurance company.
Obviously therefore I don't need the insurance: in the very unlikely case title might be challenged I can always just sue the policy of the (now deceased) people who sold the house to me.
The title company of course did not like this. More importantly: they were the one conveying the title (a lawyer doesn't do this as happens in some other states). They said "we earn our money on this and if you don't buy the insurance we won't convey the title" (i.e. complete the change of ownership). And at least around here in Palo Alto only the title insurance companies handle this, at least according to my real estate attorney.
So basically I was required to pay an extra few hundred bucks for nothing. A true "junk fee".
> Obviously therefore I don't need the insurance: in the very unlikely case title might be challenged I can always just sue the policy of the (now deceased) people who sold the house to me.
Title insurance, at least in Canada, also protects against future actions, and not just past ones:
* If someone manages to do some shenanigans and convinces someone that they own your property, and gets a second mortgage/HELOC on it, and then not pay it back, which causes the mortgage/HELOC company to put a lien on it, title insurance protects against that.
* If someone manages to sell your house to a person who then shows up at your front door on the "closing day", expecting to get inside, title insurance protects against that.
The above can happen even though you own things properly, and got them properly from the previous owners.
I guess they could have just charged you a fee for conveying the title equal to what they would have earned on the insurance premium, did you ask them yhem to do that?
It is pretty silly if CA requires a title company to do that. I have transferred titles in my state myself, here, I just take the title to the county and pay a small fee to have it recorded.
My real introduction to Title Insurance came not when I purchased my first house, but as I sold it. The buyer was an experienced builder who was buying the house (in a fairly desirable area of the city where property was appreciating quickly) in order to add upgrades and flip it.
When his agent asked why he had crossed out the line for title insurance, he retorted, "that property's been sold three times in 10 years. The title's clean."
I guess there was still some residual risk, but he had a point.
I do not buy title insurance on investment properties if the last owner had a mortgage. If the title commitment was good enough for the bank, it’s good enough for me. I build the potential clouded or impaired title into my risk model.
(I’ve also filed public comments with the CFPB on title insurance being junk fees [1], full disclosure)
What if the latest owner has a contractor’s lien on the house for an unpaid bill?
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.
> I build the potential clouded or impaired title into my risk model.
This is built into my acquisition price. Across hundreds of transactions, I have yet to experience a loss. I’m effectively self insuring against the risk, vs the cost I would’ve paid for title insurance (which would work out to tens of thousands of dollars in aggregate).
Property tax payment status, divorce cases, mortgages, and mechanics liens are all public record and can be searched for as part of researching a property. If the claim is public, I can settle it as part of the transaction on the settlement sheet with the settlement agent (who will disburse funds accordingly and handle recording/releases in concert with my real estate attorney). Unrecorded potential claims against the property are very rare in my experience. That isn’t to say it can’t happen, but only that if it does, I’m likely still coming out ahead over the long term.
The tax stuff is all public record - easily verifiable. Deaths are also generally publicly verifiable.
The rest of the stuff would essentially require intentional fraud by the seller. You’d be able to recoup most of those costs via court. Annoying for a private individual, but I tolerable as part of a portfolio.
I’ll be real, you can pretty quickly tell the type of person you’re dealing with in a home sale. The people who have a tendency to “trash their title” also show other signs of untrustworthiness during the transaction.
Most municipalities now have online records as part of their recording keeping system. This includes all of the tax information about a property. Might even include records of various permits.
If they’re not online, then they should have records in the municipal or county office. Might be a small fee to pull them, but they’ll have them.
If they don’t have records, then you may want title insurance.
I reality the dozens of Counties and hundreds of municipalities in just NJ are all different. Some online. Some not. Some online but with enormous time lag. Differing systems with different data. My township and a few dozen others were all coveted by a tax assessor who had an abomination of a Flash based web site that degraded to the devil’s own JavaScript when Flash not available.
Then you need to know the County system. And state system.
Then get into the courts. Court eFiling and search capabilities vary wildly.
In my town’s case you would need to do several on-site searches plus a few Internet based ones to do a proper title search.
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.
>What the title -search- will do is show you all of these cases which need to be cleared before insurance is issued.
No, because title insurance doesn't cover some of those things to begin with so title insurance companies and banks issuing loans couldn't care less.
>Title insurance is not about the insurance, it’s about the scan.
Yes, the scan they farm out to small software companies that scrape public records and return an "all good" if nothing shows up. This query is usually done by a teenager or early twenty-something in a call center with zero experience, just data entry.
That's an interesting argument. My intuition would've been the opposite: the title is much more likely to be dirty. 3 quick transactions in under a decade (and a fourth ongoing) means that many more opportunities for problems. Each transaction is a new opportunity involving a whole new set of people to be engaged in fraudulent conveyance or have a spouse pop out of the woodwork (as mentioned in OP).
Maybe he figured that the real safety comes from there being so many other people to sue given all the transactions...?
Patrick's point about off-record transactions feels important here. Each on-record transaction leads to an opportunity for off-record transactions to be discovered! On-record ones are likely clean in some sense, whereas 10 years of no real estate on-record transations means nobody has looked.
But to your point... the more people involved, the more moving parts involved.
The question is also who will be left holding the bag. If title searches over the past 10 years have turned up nothing problematic, then likely when the flipper sells, their buyer's title search won't turn up anything either.
And once their eventual buyer buys the house, it's their problem (not the flipper's) -- well, their title insurer's problem -- if a title dispute comes up later.
And given that the flipper's goal is to hold the house for a relatively short time and make a profit on the improvements, a thousand or few saved on the title insurance could actually be a material amount of that profit.
The flipper will be left holding the bag. The 10 years of prior searches won’t help you if the last owner snubbed a contractor and had a lien slapped on the house. Or a number of other scenarios.
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.
Insurance has negative expected value in return for risk pooling.
If something has a high level of importance in your finances or for other reasons, it makes sense to buy insurance. If you can handle the risk yourself (typically because the investment is not a terribly large amount of your total investments, and you do not think risk for this investment is correlated with risk to your other investments), then it doesn't make sense to buy insurance.
House flippers could be anything from very small one-person operations who would be wiped out if they had to clear a lien, to fairly large operations who can absorb the occasional risk into their costs of doing business.
That's fundamentally why title insurance doesn't pay out much. They exclude most defects that aren't discoverable and it's easy for everyone to find the defects that are. They are providing little actual protection hence why they pay out so little of premiums as claims.
The opposite might be true actually--in my state, squatter's rights apply once a person has believed they hold the title for 7.5 years (20 years if they don't hold a title)
So it would be better from this perspective to not have much buying & selling, as long as the most recent owner is trustworthy & has used the property for the past 7.5 years.
I’m very curious to know how many flippers are on the books with FHA. Definitely a nonzero amount. Who’s really checking up on owner occupancy? Like 4 overworked feds in DC?
FHA loans can't be used for investment properties. You must move in within 60 days and retain residence for one year.
The only exception that I know of is if you buy and move into a multi-unit building and occupy one of the units yourself.
If you obtain an FHA loan, you are attesting an intention to comply with these requirements. Going into the loan with the intention of selling quickly (not occupying and or flipping in less than a year) exposes you to charges of fraud.
> Many people, when they learn about land trusts, immediately assume that something extremely hinky is going on. Not so much; this is an extremely common way for savvy people to own property. It is in no way a loophole.
I'm inclined to disagree with this. One of those "not everyone doing it is up to no good, but everyone who is up to no good is definitely doing it" things. Obscuring ownership makes it a lot easier to evade the state in other matters.
The UK register of beneficial ownership referred to in the article applies to registered companies AFAIK.
You cannot get much information on land ownership from public registers in the UK other than the name and address of the owner, and the name and address of any mortgage holder so the problem this solves does not exist in the UK either. There is a requirement that overseas entities owning UK property register their ownership, but that is all I know of.
> [Generally the US local authority] does not record ownership but rather records certain private transactions. Current ownership is not an independent fact; current ownership is the sum of all compounding transactions since time not-quite-immemorial.
A surprising law foundation in the US is that if you live somewhere long enough as if you were the owner, then it becomes yours. Sometimes known as "squatters rights". This feels a bit unfair at first.
However, this "if you think you own it, you probably do own it" has turned out fairly well. At least in most places in the US, unlike England, you don't have to trace all property transfers back to Norman Conquest in 1066 in order to know who owns land. Anyone who holds it long enough resets the baseline date at which you need to trace it back to.
As a practical matter I think this mostly confuses adverse tenancy with adverse possession. The latter case, of squatters gaining full legal title to a piece of property, is extraordinarily rare, and as I understand it the cases all tend to be marginal (like: abutments of adjacent rural properties changing hands). Adverse tenancy is somewhat more common: you can establish through your actions an expectation that you're a legitimate tenant, and it can be legally obnoxious to remove a tenant.
The cases Patrick describes in this piece aren't really about adverse possession, but rather about property sales where the seller (or the seller's seller, etc) doesn't have the full legal authority to sell in the first place, and the people who do show up later to contest the sale.
Yes, I think what most people think of when they think of "squatters" in the US is a much different dispute over tenancy, not title. Most (all?) places in the US it is possible to be a legitimate tenant without any lease agreement, although I've found many people aren't aware of this. The term "squatter" is used for a broad spectrum of issues of tenancy, many of which aren't at all clear-cut. The current popular take on the issue might be that it's some kind of loophole or problem with the law which should be summarily handled, but the root of the issue is simply that cops aren't courts that can't perform complicated eviction proceedings, even if one party claims that the issue is simple (because it might not be).
Adverse position cleans up title, because the conditions are basically live in it and fufill the obligations of an owner for X years, and you are the owner.
So if many years later, someone comes out of the woodwork to claim a fradulent conveyance, it doesn't matter. You lived in it and paid taxes as if it was yours for 10 years (or whatever), so either it's yours by conveyance or yours by adverse possession, and it's too late to undo the transfer.
I think that the case that Patrick describes leads straight into the intended case for adverse possession. You need to extend the timeline a litte.
Okay, so Bob owns a house. Bob marries Jane in an ill-advised, quickly ignored ceremony, but never gets formally divorced. Bob sells his house (in a community property state) to Ted. Ted lives in the house for 20 years. Jane dies. Jane's son Rick goes through her stuff, realizes that she was still married to Bob, realizes that Jane had a legitimate claim on the house that Ted has been living in for 20 years.
This is a classic adverse possession situation. Ted has been openly and notoriously living in this house, acting as owner. If Rick presses his claim, it is likely that Ted can win an adverse possession claim (assuming that Ted lives in a place where adverse possession still works the way it basically did in common law).
I did gopher work for Title Insurance company one summer. This type of stuff is so common in certain areas. Another common one we saw similar to "X party has claim no one realized" was "Property was passed down generation from generation and now someone wants to sell it and lack of clear title emerges because property is still in long dead grandparents name."
> The latter case, of squatters gaining full legal title to a piece of property, is extraordinarily rare, and as I understand it the cases all tend to be marginal (like: abutments of adjacent rural properties changing hands).
The marginal cases are more common certainly, but the full version does happen. There's one that comes up on Reddit every so often of someone living in a home that had been abandoned in the 2008 crisis and presumably just written off by the legal owners (sounded like it had been owned via multiple levels of bankrupt property companies) for long enough that they claimed ownership, apparently successfully.
The one I see on Reddit is "Texas guy buys $300,000 house for $16" (the registration fee), but he was evicted less than a year later. I'd love to see the case where someone succeeded in holding the house! I did go looking, but it's just yard fence after yard fence in the court cases.
No, England has a new system, as of 2002. Property ownership records have been centralized, under "HM Land Registry", which has more authority than it used to have.
Those records are now treated as definitive. If a fraudster can get a record changed in HM Land Registry, they own the property. The fraudster can only be sued for damages.[1] The fraudster has probably sold the property to an innocent party. That innocent party now has good title to the property, and the original owner is out.
People have gone on vacation and had their houses stolen.
Adverse possession becomes a lot more of an obvious outcome when one stops thinking about urban areas and well put together homes, and instead starts thinking about abandoned areas and properties with unknown owners. At the end of the day, towns want to collect property taxes and would rather have someone improving a property and paying taxes on it than a slowly degrading property that has clearly been forgotten about, considering the owner didn't notice the adverse tenant for decades. Or maybe nobody could manage to contact the owner for decades. Or maybe the named owner for a plot of land was lost to time. What is the other option, leave it untouched for decades and centuries because at some point in the past someone had their name on it?
This seems like a problem that's automatically solved by land tax. If the property is abandoned, the tax goes unpaid and the state auctions the property off to cover the unpaid tax. Voila, new owner of record.
That works to the extent that a polity is willing and able to seize, care for, and sell off parcels. At scale, this is not guaranteed to be as easy as it sounds. Case in point: Detroit.
When I applied for a development permit for my PV arrays, I had to do something very similar to the core of a title search. I headed on down to the county records department, and had to track down each sale (in reverse order), which are recorded in big paper books with handwritten entries, sorted by the first letter of the seller's family name then by date.
However, since this is New Mexico, and even the idea of formal record keeping here is, cough, rather recent, I only had to go back to 1980 for the purposes of the permit
Yes, but keep in mind that "as if you were the owner" in at least some jurisdictions means that you were maintaining and improving the property and paying the property taxes. And we're talking about many years, not just squatting on a vacant property for a few months.
This whole situation is absolutely bizarre to me as an Australian. Our states converted to a system of centrally registered title (also known as Torrens title) over a hundred years ago to avoid the “old system” problem of tracing ownership records backwards in time. Although the system is still in effect for some properties, in many cases they’ve been converted anyway.
And yet my conveyancer (WA) last year still tried to hock me some expensive additional title insurance. My line to her was “this sounds like it’s protecting me from you not doing your job”. I don’t recall the response but it was unconvincing.
You’d think conveyancing would be cheaper here, but you’re still spending $2-3k on who knows what to transact property. At least the process is quick and final compared to the mess in other common law jurisdictions
That's partly because the dominant platform for electronic conveyancing, PEXA, has a monopoly. Only licensed professionals who pay subscription fees can access PEXA. This removes competitive pressure on conveyancing fees because self-represented buyers must use a slower, riskier, non-standard paper process.
I regret paying extra for buyer's title insurance on my home. (In my state, this is separate from the lender's title insurance policy.) I got sued a week after closing by someone with a meritless claim against the sellers, whose lawyer admitted they only added me to the suit "to put pressure on <sellers> to settle." I paid over $10k in legal fees and got $0 back from the insurance policy. (The claims against me were dismissed on summary judgment as a matter of law, and the sellers eventually won at trial, and later again on appeal, on the remaining claims.)
Just as frustrating, the title company knew about the claim before closing but didn't see fit to tell me. (They asked the seller to indemnify the title company—not me—from potential lawsuits, but the seller refused. The sale closed anyways, with none of this drama on my radar until well into the proceeding lawsuit.)
The reason the policy was worthless was that it had a very narrow definition of what constituted a title defect, and it would have involved another expensive, uncertain battle in court to try to establish that the lawsuit against me should have been covered. It was better to just eat my legal fees and treat them as part of the purchase price of the house.
You paid ten grand in legal fees for a suit that was summarily dismissed? Sounds like not only were you fleeced by the title insurance co, you were fleeced by your attourney too! Maybe there is some reasonable explanation for the high fee, but I am having trouble thinking of what it might be.
Lawyers' time isn't free, and even if you're in the right, it still takes time and money to get a judge to agree with you. South Dakota is like most states, where the expectation is that each of the parties to a lawsuit is responsible for their own costs and fees, regardless of who wins.
"Fun" coda to this story was that about 9 months into the lawsuit, the Plaintiff and his family got hit with an unrelated Federal Civil Rights lawsuit. They own a hotel a few miles from my house, and instituted a blanket ban on Native Americans on the premises, because—in their words—"you can't tell the good Indians from the bad Indians." They put this policy (and their rationale behind it) in writing, if that gives you a hint as to the sort of legal masterminds we were up against.
I have to wonder why we haven't moved towards the Japanese example in the article, where the government provides a single-source of truth for title ownership.
The low-value, high-margin industry disappears, and presumably there are mechanisms built into the state to resolve problems.
I suspect it comes from a very similar logic to "why aren't wills centrally filed instead of random notaries and dueling documents?"
We have a registry in New Zealand: we don't need title insurance (I haven't heard of it but presume it is available). Unfortunately there are still plenty of other silly costs that remain: the lawyer conveyancing is still approx $1000, you must purchase a LIM in your own name if you wish to be able to contest certain failures of your local government, mortgages require property insurance, property insurers require a variety of expensive work (often pointless shit), you can't get the government cover except indirectly via property insurance, ... Fortunately we mostly don't use sellers agents but vendors agents still take 2 or 3 percent and agents require certification so it has aspects like a monopoly with little competitive pressure.
And the registry can be interrogated so privacy is a problem. Mortgage information also shows in credit reports so there's even less privacy with that sensitive information.
The US approach is probably better. People have a very strong urge to centralise all power and knowledge in one centralised body but that is bad strategy. (1) Powerful centralised bodies usually end in disaster. If they get strong enough, they revert to groupthink and start breaking things. (2) Governments don't have enough bandwidth to deal with all this stuff. If the government is handling 10 critical services badly, voters can only reliably vote on 1 per election and it is a struggle to work out what the priority is. And (3) the office doesn't force reality to be simple, it just bulldozers over inherent complexity in the real world.
Pushing as much of the process as possible into the courts and private sphere is better strategy than having a blessed database. It gives people more opportunities to sort things out quickly and in parallel with other issues.
The proper US answer shouldn't be federal centralisation, but centralsation per state. That should avoid to worst centralisation issues and have clear benefits. And it clearly works in other countries that are smaller or bigger than individual states: it works in New Zealand (similar to Oregon) and Australia (about 30 million people, though I don't know if their registry is federally centralised) for example.
Land registry in Germany is per city/town/municipality. Since land doesn't really move, it is always registered in the municipality where it is located. All titles, mortgages, owners and weirdnesses (local shepherd having the right to graze his sheep on your land) are registered locally. Downside is that e.g. taking a mortgage on your house incurs the additional cost of recording the mortgage in the land registry and removing the record after the mortgage is paid.
Title insurance is pure profit in some states. In Texas, the state sets the premiums and this is dependent on the home sale price [1].
In TX, for every $1 collected by title insurance companies, the insurance companies paid out roughly 1-2 cents. 98-99% profit. [2]
I have honestly contemplated setting up my own title insurance company, advertise low rate title insurance but under the table give the buyer or seller half of the premium back to them.
Title insurance also covers (sometimes long standing) errors in the survey of the property boundary. This can be somewhat expensive to say, move your driveway off someone else’s property.
I always thought of title insurance as a complete farce. However, I did end up with a scenario where title insurance paid out (to me) to the tune of several thousand dollars when I was sued by a neighbor.
The neighbor accused me of infringing on her property. I, in turn, proved (enough to the title insurance company, anyway) that the neighbor had also infringed on my property, and had done so in an invisible way (underground) since before I purchased the property. Since that infringement was not disclosed to me when I closed on the property, the title insurance company agreed to compensate me for that infringement to save the expenses of litigation.
At the end of the day, I ended up net positive to my own pocket as a result of their litigation. Unfortunately, a lot of lawyers made a lot of money in the process and everything (insurance, etc) ends up being more expensive as a result of crap like this.
I recall enterprising lawyers researched California coastal property titles back to the 19th century to overcome more recent prohibitions on subdivision -- successfully! Does anyone remember their names or details?
I recently performed a title search on a property going back to the 1820’s - the land was issued to the original owner by James Monroe and the buck stopped there.
An acquaintance performed a title search on another property going back to the 1100’s. They found a serious black and white error circa 1225 which voided the entire chain of claim. They did not report the error.
> An acquaintance performed a title search on another property going back to the 1100’s. They found a serious black and white error circa 1225 which voided the entire chain of claim. They did not report the error.
If this is the UK and the land-in-question is registered in the records held by the HM Land Registry, the black-and-white error is already void only recently-ish (Land Registration Act 2002 gave a 10-year "last chance" claims for very old deed errors, and the error you mentioned is now extinguished). Even if if was reported by your chap, HM Land Registry will just shrug because it literally has no legal effect now.
Every state has their own laws. Interestingly some states advantage squatting with a colorable claim of title. For example if your uncle John leaves you real property in his will that he doesn’t have title to and you notoriously occupy and use that property for seven years you can apply for a clean title. Without that colorable claim you might need twenty years or more.
> The rest is a mix of government fee passthroughs and Obvious Nonsense, such as a $125 “water processing fee,” $55 for a wire transfer where that number is just made up, etc. But if I were to go through each of the 16 line items summing up to $1,400, we’d be here all day.
1400 EUR here in notary and government racket to change the number of shares in the company. Two paragraphs containing ultra basic math wrapped in legalese.
These 16 lines seems like they got a lot for $1400 compared to me. There's still way to go: the government rackets better and if they want to really sucker money in, they have to learn from the best!
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.
>You are paying for title insurance mostly to buy the expertise of a local title agent who knows how to look up things locally.
No longer true. Almost all title shops subcontract this out to small software companies that scrape public records and return an "all good" if nothing shows up. This query is usually done by a teenager or early twenty-something in a call center with zero experience, just data entry.
>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.
Sure there are, they're just private. Think LexisNexis.
>You need to check various level of governments if taxes are up to date. If they are not, there may be an implied lien.
The nature of the scam is not from title insurance being unnecessary, but title insurance not being purchased on an open market like other insurance products. It's added in to the contract, with financial benefit to the real estate agent, and not discussed.
The author's point about real estate being one-shot for the buyer and seller is spot-on.
I disagree. Title insurance requires highly localized specialty agents from the municipality up to the county to the State to Federal.
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.
In the UK, title insurance used to be common because it was difficult to prove nobody had some 300 year old claim that was valid, but not recorded anywhere.
The government passed a law giving anyone with such a claim 10 years to record it in the title registry, and after the deadline any unregistered claims were extinguished. And the title registry is digital and (basically) authoritative.
Of course, that doesn't stop the people doing house sales paperwork from trying to charge you £50 for insurance that literally does nothing....
As someone’s who is pretty enmeshed in the RE industry, I never heard of title searches being done locally or by a local agent. 90% of it is automated by the 3 big underwriters and the rest, should something specific come up, gets dealt with by some low rank title co employee.
What you say is true, but does not address the possibility of an open market for such local agents, rather than the buyer simply accepting the realtor's recommendation in the overwhelming majority of cases.
One of the reasons the title insurance market exists is because governments can’t even reliably record title events in a timely manner. Putting them in charge of risk management would only make it worse.
I would say you're missing out, but it really depends on the things you value in life.
That said, I've known people who regretted buying a particular piece of property, but I don't think I know anyone who regrets not having a landlord anymore.
As someone who is in the process of buying a house right now.. can someone give the TLDR of what I can actually do? Refuse the title insurance? Also the bit about land trust.. does this impact my ability to be underwritten for a mortgage?
Obviously therefore I don't need the insurance: in the very unlikely case title might be challenged I can always just sue the policy of the (now deceased) people who sold the house to me.
The title company of course did not like this. More importantly: they were the one conveying the title (a lawyer doesn't do this as happens in some other states). They said "we earn our money on this and if you don't buy the insurance we won't convey the title" (i.e. complete the change of ownership). And at least around here in Palo Alto only the title insurance companies handle this, at least according to my real estate attorney.
So basically I was required to pay an extra few hundred bucks for nothing. A true "junk fee".