321–330 of 360 posts
I wonder if thats what happened here too?
For what it's worth. If you own Real Property in England, even if only a Leasehold (Long Lease e.g. 99 years) you can get the Land Registry to email you about activity or, once per year, the lack of activity for your property records. https://propertyalert.landregistry.gov.uk/ Land Registry records have a sort of poor man's locking. The buyers (or in practice their solicitor) need to first perform a "Search" which wo…
That's messed up — it pushes the blame onto the victims for not monitoring.
We humans can and do try to fight against nature. But that's exactly what it is, a fight! And I doubt the Art of War said "Pay no attention to your enemies. They will leave you be."
> Once the house was sold to the new owner for £131,000 by the person impersonating Mr Hall, they legally owned it. That's nuts. Why isn't it the case that the person who failed to properly vet the seller is out of £131,000 and the house? So I can "buy" a local mansion and then say "oops, I didn't know this random guy didn't own it. Oh well."
Also, how does the seller disappear with that much money without being able to be IDed? That seems like a severe failure of the state. It almost makes me wonder if this is a semi common scam wealthy folks use to take poor people's desirable homes.
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About 85% of land in the UK is registered - including the vast majority of domestic dwellings.
My apologies - bad memory https://whoownsengland.org/2019/01/11/the-holes-in-the-map-e...
Either download the GML or view it on the map. This gives you a number which you can pump into https://eservices.landregistry.gov.uk/eservices/FindAPropert...
And the spend £3 buying the deeds for the property. One look at the coverage in your local area shows the type of properties available, for example Parliament Square (North and South), or tiny bits of rock off the edge of the Isles of Scilly, as well as more pedestrian locations like "Flat 1-14, Grosvenor Court, 55 Upper Grosvenor Road, Tunbridge Wells, TN1 2DY"
A lot of unregistered land, certainly in towns, are roads and railways that have been there for over 100 years
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> If you consider each country's history with respect to property and power, it makes sense. Could you elaborate on that, please? I don't know which historical aspects you're referring to.
My interpretation - the UK was about having a few gentry owning all the land and a lot of peasants that just work on the land. The US was about giving each settler a Homestead of previously unowned land (Natives not being considered capable of owning land, because racism ). So, a registry would be easy to operate in the UK, but the US was too big and poorly connected and had too many land owners to make that viable.…
Now, the contemporary English system isn’t strictly speaking Torrens, it actually is somewhat of a hybrid between a pure Torrens system (as used in Australia and many other places), and the original English system (which slowly evolved out of mediaeval English law) and which is still mostly retained in the US. But still, to the extent that the records of the Land Registry take priority over the actual title documents, it is closer to the Torrens system than most US systems.
I think the main reasons for the lesser adoption of Torrens in the US have little to do with the reasons you suggest. Trying to link the US non-adoption of it to the dispossession of indigenous people is dubious given that Australia, where it was invented, has a similar history. It is basically due to the greater number and greater conservatism of US state jurisdictions (here I mean “conservatism” primarily in the “slow-to-embrace-change” sense, rather than conservatism as a political ideology, this is the kind of technocratic legal issue about which neither progressives nor conservatives, in the ideological sense, care much), and also due to the lobbying power of the US title services/insurance industry, which sees the greater simplicity of the Torrens system (most of the time, ignoring occasional problems and frauds like this, which can and have happened under pre-Torrens systems too) as a threat to their established business models
Torrens essentially tries to optimise for the most common case, in which title is clear and no fraud is going on, and make that common case as simple and cheap as possible, even if by doing so the outcome in those rare cases of disputes and frauds may not always be completely optimal
Lol how does this sort of shit even happen in 2021. It's meant to be "the future".
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It sounds like a sophisticated fraud. They probably target clergy or others who have well known public schedules. I assume there is an equivalent of title insurance in the UK that will pay out though.
The original owner is not going to be the one with title insurance though, that's usually bought by the buyer, not the seller, especially not a seller who isn't even aware that there is a transaction.
As for whether fraudulent sales should be reverted or not, I've been pondering the question since I read the story yesterday and come to the conclusion that it would be good to apply some common sense:
* Someone buys a house without looking at it, before or after the sale, as an investment because the price seems really attractive. It is then discovered that the owner, who is living in the house, was not involved in the "sale". Obviously they should revert the transfer of ownership and compensate the purchaser.
* Someone buys a field, gets planning permission, builds a house on it, and moves in. Ten years later it is discovered that the real owner of the field, a company in Dubai, was not involved in the "sale". Obviously the transfer should not be reverted and the involuntary seller should be compensated.
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If the Land Registry says you own the property, you can rest assured you own it. Sounds to me like you can only rest assured at the moment the Land Registry tells you. After that, it’s only a matter of time before some scammer sells your house out from under you. Not a great system.
Seems like you should be able to lock your title just like domain names.