If "dirty" titles are an issue (and title insurance costing $300 suggests it is), Why is there no government department (state or federal) holding the title registry?
That would also solve the problem. Once again it seems like this is a social issue not a technical issue.
>Why is there no government department (state or federal) holding the title registry?
The governments (e.g. county courthouses) do store copies of the documents such as deeds and transfers. They stamp them with their seal so in that sense, they do "hold the authoritative title records".
However, there is no computer database with rows for all real estate that has a binary column called "CLEAN_TITLE" with values TRUE/FALSE.
Therefore, the actual state of a "clean title" isn't a flag but a case-by-case determination based on documents analysis. What an employee from a title company will often do is actually drive down to the court house and sit there looking through document archives to trace the chain of sales. This also includes looking at microfiche films[1] if the courthouse hasn't migrated all their images to electronic image databases. If the worker feels confident there are no outstanding claims, the title company can issue "insurance" that the title is clean. (Occasionally, the determination was wrong and the title company has to pay out the insurance because of their mistake.)
If the property gets sold again, another title company worker may do the same redundant "documents analysis". (Because new claims can be recorded against the deed since the last time the property was sold.) Yes, it's a really inefficient process!
Conceivably, a buyer could buy property without title insurance but since most people require loans, a bank won't lend money unless it has assurance the title is clean (because that property is the bank's collateral so it has to have confidence that nobody else has claims that supersedes the bank's.)
Could the governments create a convenient centralized database to solve those issues? Yes. But some people might prefer to have a distributed ledger to bypass the government holding those records. (E.g. the courthouse charges $20 to "record deed documents" or "$1 per page for copies of deeds", etc). The distributed ledger could theoretically not require those fees or make them very small.
The fundamental question is "why is it easier to get everyone to agree to put their real estate transactions in a distributed ledger than in a centralized ledger?"
I tried to explain that in the last paragraph. Some people might want the features of distributed ledger such as less transaction costs and/or convenience of recording property transfers without requiring without filing papers with the government. Or the decentralized ledger assures public immutable records whereas with the central db, you have to trust there won't be a malicious government employee changing database data to fake ownership records.
Sure, in a limited sense... every distributed ledger use case can be replaced with a centralized database. The reason people would choose a distributed solution is to bypass the controls of the centralized authority. Similar reasons that bitcoin proponents prefer it over centralized fiat government currency.
Whether those distributed reasons are cost-effective or sensible remains to be seen. Who knows, maybe distributed ledgers will become so mainstream that it will be the county governments themselves that seed the real estate blockchain so they don't have to bother administering a central db.
(To be clear, I'm not trying to convince anyone of switching to distributed ledgers but laying out possible use cases.)
That would also solve the problem. Once again it seems like this is a social issue not a technical issue.