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i don't physically own it, i have a piece of paper in the town hall saying i do (quokk.au)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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[–] 15 points 10 months ago (6 children)

Interestingly, NFTs could solve a lot of issues with deeds. This was posted on reddit some years ago

Spent some time working in real estate fraud. Your question [regarding somebody hacking your wallet and stealing the deed] creates a scary scenario but let me assure it isn't better now. You would be surprised at how hilariously easy it is to get on title for a property and start fucking with it.

All I need is the current owners information (public record) and I can go record a deed right now. Its called a wild deed and while they don't usually cause any trouble if your state laws are decent you can very easily wake up to someone else's name on your title and an annoying legal process to clear it.

It happens by accident ALL the time and people usually don't realize it until they try to refinance.

AINs that are different by a single digit are more than common. Deeds can be hand-written and there is a lot of room for human error in the recording process.

"Is that a 6 or a 0?" - Registrar employee about to ruin your month.

Now your neighbor "owns" your property, your lender is sending you angry letters, and you have a court date just to delete a document with a typo on it.

This is before we get into criminals actually trying to steal from you. The damage can be catastrophic. You will lose your home if you sign the wrong paper or (more recently) put your thumb on the wrong ipad.

There are issues here for sure but don't think a paper deed in a lockbox is much safer than an nft. It's just how we've always done it.

While I think the collectable NFT craze has crashed and burned, it was an interesting experiment. I think NFTs in some way have a use case. While not specifically an NFT, Buenos Aires for example rolled out crypto/blockchain backed Identification.

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  • [–] 7 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (5 children)

    I'm not sure NFTs specifically are the right solution for this though, because the ultimate legal authority for property ownership remains the state, which could easily get out of sync with transactions that are valid on the blockchain but which are not legally recognized. Like if your crypto wallet gets stolen and someone transfers your properties, or if property NFTs are transferred in spite of creditors having a legal claim to them, the state of the network is going to be superceded by the law, which would end up with a confusing mess and probably adding requirements for the system to incorporate centralized control and reversibility, defeating the point of it being a NFT.

    A simpler improvement would be to require that all updates to property records be simply published onchain, by whatever authority otherwise has the power to manage property ownership (read-only for everyone else). Changes could be made, errors could be fixed, but the record of the state of the system would be permanently and irrevocably available for anyone to view and verify, which is the main thing NFTs would potentially bring to the table here anyway. You don't need the part where it is a permissionlessly transferable token tied to a crypto wallet.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago (4 children)

    If I'm interpreting your improvement correctly, that's kind of how real estate property records already work (in my state in the US at least). As it stands now, a clerk at a county register of deeds office will record practically anything that you pay them to record. They do not interpret what is or isn't a fraudulent deed, for example, because that would expose the clerk and the state to liability. If issues arise about ownership, that's what the courts are for. Anyone can go down to the register of deeds' office (or in some cases access the records online) and view the deeds because they're public record. Other government entities, like the county assessor, will normally also make available a simple chain of title that shows you every deed/transfer of that property when you look it up by parcel number, address, owner name, etc. If a deed does wind up being determined to be fraudulent, normally the court order declaring it fraudulent and making a current ownership interpretation will also be recorded at the register's office (those are called quiet title cases because the court is "quieting" all other parties who are alleged to have or claiming to have an interest in the property). So there's both a public chain and a method of clearing up any inconsistencies in the chain.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago* (3 children)

    They do not interpret what is or isn’t a fraudulent deed, for example, because that would expose the clerk and the state to liability.

    Well who does? Is it really a situation where the only way to correct mistakes is a lawsuit and there is no system for preventing mistakes to begin with? Maybe some form of cryptographic verification from the owner would actually be helpful here.

    (or in some cases access the records online)

    The main thing is that they could do a lot better than that by guaranteeing access to the records and hard proof they haven't been altered or removed, and making those records reliably available to people who want to interact with them programmatically, which would be accomplished by putting them on a major blockchain.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    Mistakes can be corrected with a re-recorded deed or a recorded scrivener's affidavit. All of these instruments have to be notarized, so a clerk will check for a notary's stamp but these can also be faked or the notary themself can be tricked with fake IDs when they're witnessing the doc signing. Fraud is what has to be taken to court to fix. And most fraud in a chain of title is going to be pretty easy to spot when doing a title search, but like the original post says, most of the time the owner might not ever notice it's happened until they go to refinance or sell and the lender or purchaser orders a title search. Or someone comes knocking on their door to put up a for sale sign insisting that they own this house lol. If someone buys the property from the fraudster and doesn't get a title search done and title insurance (this is incredibly dumb, get a title search done if you ever buy real estate for this and many other reasons), then they may not find out they don't even own it until they go to sell it. Or it could pass through multiple people's/entity's hands if nobody is getting a title search. They'll all need to end up in court to get their money back. There are some registers who offer a sort of notification system for if your property gets transferred, but even still it just notifies you when the deed has been done (literally).

    I think that creating a block chain could improve some aspects of real estate transfer, like needing to even do a title search, but I don't 100% understand the nuances of how they work and would have questions about what sort of problems might arise if someone loses whatever key they use to access it or if they die or something and don't leave a will with the key behind. Wouldn't that create issues that would need a court to get involved to determine ownership?

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (1 child)

    I guess that would depend on whether and how key signing by the owner is incorporated into the system. The way I imagine it working is, when purchasing a property you can (optionally?) cryptographically sign the document, probably with a hardware wallet that you would then keep in a safe somewhere. The hardware wallet contains the private key, the public key is added to the document which would be further signed by the notary in the same way before being put on the blockchain. You can then do things like sign listings for selling the property to prove to prospective buyers that you are the current owner (they can verify that your signature matches the key on the document, and the document is also signed by a known authority), and sign documents for selling it with your key.

    If the key is lost, then in order to sell the property you would probably have to go through some kind of correction process, and an updated document with the new key/signature or that says a key is no longer being used, and has a reference to the old document it's superseding, is put on the blockchain. Probably this process should involve extra scrutiny about your identity. If it's stolen and the thief starts using it, I guess same thing plus legal proceedings, but there should be systems to automatically notify you in various ways if anything is happening (and if the documents are on the blockchain, you can even poll for these notifications yourself without relying on any government servers). If you die and the key is lost, same kind of deal, correction process with a new document uploaded. Actual enforcement in practice of a valid signature being required could mostly be automatically handled by websites for real estate listings; if the latest document says the owner's cryptographic signature is required for sale, that signature could also be required to even make the listing.

    Validity of notary keys would be a little trickier, but you could have something like a hierarchy of keys that sign metadata about which lower level keys are valid for which time ranges and which of their transactions have been revoked. If the highest level key in the hierarchy is compromised, a new one gets issued and the event is communicated to the public through official channels so everyone can update all their software to use the new one and ignore the old one. Because this is a possibility, and because anything recorded could be superseded by a correction, this type of system would not be suitable for other smart contracts to interact with directly, so unlike something with NFTs you wouldn't easily be able to trade properties on DeFi markets (which for previously mentioned reasons and others I don't think would work well anyway).

    My own experience with the process of buying property was that it's pretty sketchy; most of it happened remotely, and the main way I had of confirming that the deal was legit as advised by my real estate agent was, iirc, stuff like that the title company's website was highly ranked on google and had a domain name with few letters and listed their phone number, but these things are not a hard guarantee. I do think there is room for improvement.

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