Yah there is that. In the US, it is usually mandated that you get something called "title insurance". There are different levels depending who it protects (lender vs buyer). If down the line it turns out you don't own the land your house is on, the title insurance company does lawsuit magic or somehow pays to make the lender whole.

End up costing ?? $1,000 or so per real estate transaction. 99.9999% of the time pays back zero. I suppose nice to have for the last .0001%.

We had to use ours. What happened is that the title people didn't realise the guy selling us the house had two properties and they paid off the wrong house.

Then the guy sold his (newly paid off) house and disappeared.

The first time we leaned anything was amiss was when we had an eviction notice posted on our door. The title company didn't bother telling us until it got that far.

It caused a whole bunch of problems and the company kept dragging their feet hoping someone else would pay. It took a lawyer and threat of a suit to get them to finally pay out.