> This is a question about my personal property. I bought land in 2001. I built a house on it in 2008, at which time I paid off the loan I used to purchase the property, and took out a new loan to build the house. At that time I had to get title insurance. I don't remember if I got it the first time in 2001, I imagine I did. When I built the house, I had a construction loan, and then that became a 30 yr mortgage when construction was complete. I did 30 years because I still had my previous house, which I was paying on.
>
> So, in early 2012 I sold my previous house. Now I want to refinance my mortgage at a 15 year term. I ask the current mortgage holder (a bank who never sells their mortgages) and they quote me a pretty decent rate (it would be a 15 year fixed rate jumbo loan). But, they say I need to get a new title insurance policy. That is the majority of the closing costs.
>
> Can someone explain why I need a new policy? Seems like the whole title business is a big rip-off. A Wikipedia article states that in 2003, the title insurance industry paid out $662 million in claims, and took in $15.7 billion in premiums.
>
> Also, interestingly, we are one of the few countries in the world that even has a title insurance industry.
I was talking to a realtor the other night about surveys for residential property sales. She said that in her area (which is largely a retirement community), a lot of the sales are cash deals that don't involve a mortgage. So they don't need a survey. I asked her if they got Title Insurance on cash deals. She said yes, because it was written into their boilerplate contract for sale that the seller will buy the title insurance for the property being sold. To bad a survey of the property isn't automatically written into every contract for sale.