The correlated errors part is what should worry people, more than the error rate. A 1-2% price variance you can price in. Two sources being wrong in the same direction means your cross-check was never a cross-check.
I build on the tax sale side and it's the same shape there. Almost every commercial dataset in that space sits downstream of the same county publication, so when a county posts an amendment or quietly replaces a file, every vendor inherits the identical error at the same moment. You can pull three sources, get three matching answers, and all three are reflecting one bad fetch upstream.
The habit that seems to help is treating provenance as a field. Not just what a record says, but which office it came from and when it was last confirmed. Two records that trace back to the same original aren't two records.
Is there any convention for that in title yet, or is it still per-vendor?
County records are the single source of truth for title in Eastern US States. Title Agents shouldn't and to my knowledge don't, search property records from sources such as the MLS, not for title commitment purposes anyway. For marketing, perhaps, but then the validity of the data is far less important.
However, this is an excellent example as to why title agents need to carefully vet their vendors to ensure where they are getting their data from and to make sure that they are searching county data directly from the county and not a third party who might be sourcing data from other locations.
I am less familiar with the Title Plant model used in Western US, so I can't comment on where they are sourcing their data from or what they are doing to cross reference and validate.
If the county gets something wrong, title may pick up the error, but a properly conducted title search doesn't just rely on the reported data set in the table, they pull copies of the recorded documents theymselves and validate the data based on the document itself.
And sometimes, even the document is wrong. But that's not a new technology problem, that's a problem as old as paper. For example, I've encountered legal descriptions that are wrong. A typo is made once and it's carried on through the record, deed after deed after deed, until one day someone double checks and realizes that it doesn't add up. But there are legal remedies for situations like that. I have seen new technology from Talos Title Ai that will actually make it easier to pick up those sorts of discrepancies in the chain of title, which is a huge win.
Technology is a tool. How you use it is what makes the difference.
The correlated errors part is what should worry people, more than the error rate. A 1-2% price variance you can price in. Two sources being wrong in the same direction means your cross-check was never a cross-check.
I build on the tax sale side and it's the same shape there. Almost every commercial dataset in that space sits downstream of the same county publication, so when a county posts an amendment or quietly replaces a file, every vendor inherits the identical error at the same moment. You can pull three sources, get three matching answers, and all three are reflecting one bad fetch upstream.
The habit that seems to help is treating provenance as a field. Not just what a record says, but which office it came from and when it was last confirmed. Two records that trace back to the same original aren't two records.
Is there any convention for that in title yet, or is it still per-vendor?
County records are the single source of truth for title in Eastern US States. Title Agents shouldn't and to my knowledge don't, search property records from sources such as the MLS, not for title commitment purposes anyway. For marketing, perhaps, but then the validity of the data is far less important.
However, this is an excellent example as to why title agents need to carefully vet their vendors to ensure where they are getting their data from and to make sure that they are searching county data directly from the county and not a third party who might be sourcing data from other locations.
I am less familiar with the Title Plant model used in Western US, so I can't comment on where they are sourcing their data from or what they are doing to cross reference and validate.
If the county gets something wrong, title may pick up the error, but a properly conducted title search doesn't just rely on the reported data set in the table, they pull copies of the recorded documents theymselves and validate the data based on the document itself.
And sometimes, even the document is wrong. But that's not a new technology problem, that's a problem as old as paper. For example, I've encountered legal descriptions that are wrong. A typo is made once and it's carried on through the record, deed after deed after deed, until one day someone double checks and realizes that it doesn't add up. But there are legal remedies for situations like that. I have seen new technology from Talos Title Ai that will actually make it easier to pick up those sorts of discrepancies in the chain of title, which is a huge win.
Technology is a tool. How you use it is what makes the difference.