Edit: Thanks for the downvote(s), care to explain where I am wrong?
Look https://ltsa.ca/property-information/what-information-title here, all Statutory rights of way, Easements, Covenants, Judgments, Leases, Claims of Builders Liens are on the title.
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.
Title insurance is dumb but in some form its pretty nice. Likely overpriced by an order of magnitude or so.
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.
"Umm, we lost all records of deeds for a city. Please resubmit your land claims to our office..."
In the future, escrows will be handled by smart contacts for a lot cheaper, not people.
As for property manager, with the surfeit of online tools for everything from listing, screening tenants to rent payment, their value is significantly diminished
Agreed.
> In the future, escrows will be handled by smart contacts for a lot cheaper, not people.
Seems exceptionally unlikely. That doesn't work unless all the infrastructure they interface with all uses the same underlying resolution system; otherwise, someone has to provide a bridge, and that makes the "smart" contract effectively toothless. Half the job of escrow is to deal with a giant pile of legacy systems.
> As for property manager, with the surfeit of online tools for everything from listing, screening tenants to rent payment, their value is significantly diminished
"property manager as a service" seems like a fine concept, but there will still be many people who do not want to do that work themselves. By all means, be a "virtual" organization, but someone still needs to have a rolodex of repair services to call when someone needs their air conditioning fixed in the middle of the summer.
They're useful if you don't want to deal with individual tenants, ever, and just want to treat any issues that arise as an expense. Otherwise, you have to be prepared to treat a rental as a part-time job.
(That said, they can also be terrible.)
> Title/Escrow company in a home sale
Escrow seems like a critically valuable service. It shouldn't be as intertwined as it is with a pile of other services, but I wouldn't want to do without it.