In addition, people are (rightly) highly risk-averse about anything that affects their family, their home, or the assets that they built over years and decades. For example, real estate investors commonly put their property into an LLC (which costs $800/year in CA) or buy liability insurance, even though the probability of incurring a large liability is low.
With respect to costs, even though land records are public, machine-parseable title/recorder data is expensive. Data from the tax assessor (even machine-parseable) is relatively cheap, but is not as complete as recorder data. For example, it does not have mortgages. We intend to achieve economies-of-scale with respect to recorder data. At that point we intend to offer additional value at the same price (for example, insurance) and add a free-but-sell-leads service.
(2) Let me see if I get this right: you offer a service that simply monitors deeds and mortgages recorded against a specific plat and sends an alert to to the subscriber if something is recorded (which is an extremely rare event). And you charge $10/month/property for this service? What about the problem makes it so expensive? Why aren't you likely to be disrupted by someone like Zillow offering this $10/month service for FREE (and making money off the address list they develop from it, plus advertising to all the homeowners)?