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.
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?"