Probably the biggest reason would be so that when you buy a property you can independently confirm the vendor actually owns it.
That’s what title is for
Ask HN: Why is home property information so public?
31–40 of 95 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is home property information so public?
#32In Canada the MLS Canada and title ownership is gated by realtors and expensive fees which gives them all the power to control the narrative.
Re: Ask HN: Why is home property information so public?
#33Why wouldn't ownership be public? See the recent uproar[0] over the semi-anonymous purchase of land near Travis AFB. This is a clear case where market inefficiency is bad; individual sellers need to know when markets are changing and a single entity is willing to pay above assumed market rates for a large contiguous region. Anyone in favor of strong markets should favor full transparency of real estate ownership and…
It’s not just private citizens that have benefitted from this. Los Angeles was able to snag land key to its early water supply due to lack of transparency around land acquisition.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/american-history-telle...
Re: Ask HN: Why is home property information so public?
#34In general property that is owned via registration (land, domain names, copyright, trademark, patents) has public ownership listing. While property that is owned by possession (i.e. you are holding it) does not.
Re: Ask HN: Why is home property information so public?
#35Why wouldn't ownership be public? See the recent uproar[0] over the semi-anonymous purchase of land near Travis AFB. This is a clear case where market inefficiency is bad; individual sellers need to know when markets are changing and a single entity is willing to pay above assumed market rates for a large contiguous region. Anyone in favor of strong markets should favor full transparency of real estate ownership and…
Why should disclosure be forced upon the vast majority of people at significant harm when you can enforce disclosure only if you own more than X properties or some % of an area?
Re: Ask HN: Why is home property information so public?
#36Land property ownership is a very strong and very old form of ownership. Lot of countries the property registries have survived wars, regime changes, civil wars and 100s of years of dispute between neighbors.
When not public, this would surely not work or would not be accepted.
In my country looking up the registry costs like $25 ... So mass exploitation is not really that easy
Re: Ask HN: Why is home property information so public?
#37Lawyer here. Land ownership has to be public because the only way to establish your right to property is the publicly recorded and government maintained "chain of title": who you are, who you got it from, who they got it from, etc., going back to the original survey of your state (or at least 50 years, where I am). Otherwise it would be chaos with everyone waiving around 100-year-old bogus deeds claiming the right to kick you out of your house. Tax records too, as someone else mentioned - everyone can verify whether or not the assessed tax is valid and the property valuation isn't made up to punish you for stepping on the toes of some county official. There are ways to obfuscate the individuals who actually own a particular piece of land (trusts, LLCs and such), but the chain of title needs to be available to anyone.
Re: Ask HN: Why is home property information so public?
#38In Canada the MLS Canada and title ownership is gated by realtors and expensive fees which gives them all the power to control the narrative.
In my Canadian town the owners of a given property and the taxes they pay are available to the public. But indeed that doesn't mean we have access to sale prices, which are often very different from assessed values for purposes of taxation.
Re: Ask HN: Why is home property information so public?
#39Because people have been living in houses for millennia and such an idea of privacy would only have emerged in the last few decades.
In fact, only two or three decades ago it was standard for the telephone service to print everyone's name, address, and phone number in a big book, distribute it to every house and charge you $5 a month extra if you wanted to opt out of the list.
I still remember those days quite clearly. Including the fact we virtually never got spam calls.
Re: Ask HN: Why is home property information so public?
#40Why would they publish names? It's really no value to home buyers to see the name associated with a listing. In some cases, there are antidiscrimination laws that limit what information should be disclosed to sellers and buyers. Name might be one of those.
All this is available (including names of owners) from your typical government assessors web portal. Or via consolidators where the ownership, zoning, acreage, tax assessments and other data is available via an api call.
Yeah? But what benefit is the name to buyers; and does providing the name in that context violate any fair practices? Those are the real questions here.