I don't think I've ever seen a longer list of arbitrary fees than when I signed all the paperwork when buying a house. It felt like death by a thousand cuts with dozens of little $50-500 line items that seemed so arbitrary. When I would ask about them, I basically got told, "do you want the home or not..."
title checking can also be very important, because you don't want to fork over hundreds of thousands of dollars and then have the sale be invalidated because of title issues years down the road. Depending on what state you're in, this can be a non-trivial process to figure out.
Because most home purchase happen on the order of decades. A large percentage of property being purchased has titles that go back 50 years or more. Understanding who bought what when with what covenants using what surveys etc... isn't a straightforward task.
o_O what, your country/state/whatever jurisdiction doesn't have a title office?? Both Hungary and Canada (I am a citizen and real estate owner in both) has a title office where I can request the title online and it has a complete, official history.
Edit: Thanks for the downvote(s), care to explain where I am wrong?
Title transfer is more complicated than simply trusting what's listed on a document. Property, covenants, business/family arrangements and other factors change over time. All of this needs to be checked as part of the sale (or at least should be).
Respectfully: what the...? The title in the title office (or whatever else they call it) is the official truth. If someone, say, has a right to use the property until their death, that's a note on the title, not a piece of paper on the drawer. If it's not on the title, no one cares about your business or family agreement. If you contest the title based on such an agreement in a court of law you will always lose, in the most literal sense of the word, the title is all there is. I do not understand a word of what you are saying. What's going on in the USA?
When you take into account titles can have multiple leins, land can change, covenants can change, legal entities can come and go (divorce, death, business closure), banks come and go and debt is sold and a whole host of things up to and including outright fraud, simply relying on the title is often enough, but sometimes not.
Case in point, I just bought some land that I intend to build on. There was an easement on the original lot before it was subdivided. That easement was never updated to reflect the new subdivided properties. It didn't need to be, because it only applied to structures on the land, of which there were none. Due the way the covenants work for the county, where this easement was placed (my lot of the neighbors) would determine whether I can build a house on the lot. This was discovered during the title search and we had to get the county to make a decision, which required zoning consulting with a judge, before we could purchase the property.
Had I purchased this lot without a title search, I could have went ahead with financing construction and perhaps even broken ground, before this was discovered. Even planning and zoning missed it originally. Additionally, given that this was technically a dispute, if I had not done this due diligence, it's entirely possible the neighbor could have made a case for the easement and I would have been stuck with a court case which is always a gamble.
Trust me, I do a lot of real estate on the side and the few hundred dollars you pay for title insurance is well worth it when these types of issues come up. The last thing you want to deal with is going to court with your soon to be neighbors over property line, easement, covenant etc... disputes after you've already purchased the property and are forced to live with the consequences (best case your neighbors hate you, worse you're stuck with a dud property). It's a small price to pay for what is likely the largest purchase you'll make.
When I paid-off my mortgage in the UK I was disappointed not to receive the title deeds on paper.
In the past few years the land registry agency here has been encouraging lenders to scan-in old documents and destroy the paper originals, so the only active indication of ownership is a record in a database. They call this 'dematerialisation'.
I can only hope they have an excellent versioning and backup strategy.
