Plus there are lots of situations in real estate law (like ground rent where the freeholder is not identifiable) which don't fit into cute little data structures. This isn't a problem with documentation being a rush job, it's a problem with some of the records of ownership being hundreds of years old. Seeing as how I would have to hire a special archivist just to access data on an 8" floppy disk, I'm not confident that the blockchain is a long-term (i.e. centuries) solution to any of these problems.
This is an unrealistic level of infallibility to ask of people. Like taking the backspace key off a keyboard to enforce people not making typos.
I don't know if you are American or familiar with how real estate works here. It is decentralized in a way that most countries are not, and there is insurance that people buy against mistakes and problems with transferring property. In a way, you could argue that a single blockchain to track real property would be more centralized than the current system.
"the vast majority of U.S. states have opted for a system of document recording in which no governmental official makes any determination of who owns the title or whether the instruments transferring it are valid"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_insurance
"A recording system combined with title insurance decentralizes records, creating redundancy. For example, when many records were destroyed in San Francisco's 1906 earthquake, out-of-town title companies maintained records that allowed landowners to prove ownership of their property."
There is a central record for each separate local government(located at the regional judicial office), with copies being sent to up the chain.
But the thing is - over here whatever is in that local deed book is the current legal state of the property.
Licensed notary is obliged by law to check the current legal state of the property, verify identity of the ones making the change, and do the change itself - but due to sorry state of the books first part isn't always reliable.
I am also not proposing a solution for USA problems, but for my country.
People say a blockchain is decentralized, but maybe it's more accurate to say it's a centralized system without anyone being in control. Which might in fact not be preferred to an actual decentralized system.
Because in most cases, speaking from experience, after model change they will be using a new model without doing proper conversion of old data. This happened to cadastral data over here - new schema required some fields explicitly, while old data did not have them digitized, and country-wide system was made with such assumptions. It does not work to this day properly.
Archive the old chain, deploy the new one with migrated latest state from the old chain transformed to new model. keep working.
Inherently, this cuts most use cases off at the knees. Some small country your route your shipment through changes requirements? Broken.
It enforces you to input it properly, and not do half assed job due to immutability, because whatever you input in there will stay there, attached with credentials/metadata of whoever entered it.
Currently the main problem is that docs are in sorry state, it was a rush job - and that state is very profitable for some people making dubious claims to old property.
It would be easy to notice fraud, and all real estate deals need to go through proper notary anyways - would they risk their license if their failures would be visible - for ever?
Mind you I'm not trying to propose a global solution, I'm proposing blockchain use for government entities and entities that work closely with them.
It is just that governments aren't centralized on modern world, and you can leverage decentralized nature of blockchain to have a common dataset and standard available to all of those entities.