Affordability shouldn’t come at the expense of property rights

The housing market is built on a simple confidence: When you buy a home, it’s actually yours, free and clear. Recent proposals to waive title insurance on certain “low-risk” mortgages have been framed as an affordability measure. The premise sounds appealing. It sounds like an easy affordability win. It isn’t. More than that, such a move would create dangerous risks for homeowners and the economy. U.S. property records — the deeds, liens, judgments and instruments filed across more than 3,500 county recorder offices — are among the most important pieces of economic infrastructure in the country. Every mortgage, sale and refinance depends on them. But, unlike a road or a power grid, no government agency guarantees their accuracy. County recorders store documents. They don’t verify that those documents are complete, correct or free of competing claims. The critical work of searching the records, analyzing them and curing defects before they surface is performed by the title industry on millions of transactions a year. If that curative work stopped, homeowners and taxpayers would face an estimated average of approximately $600 billion in potential risk exposure annually, rising to mor...