What You Don't Know Can Hurt You!

When you buy an ordinary article like a coat, a radio, or a watch, you do not need to know whether the former owner is married, single or divorced.

You may buy stocks or bonds without caring whether the seller has a tax bill due. You may buy an automobile without worrying about whether there are any suits or judgments against the owner. But when you buy real estate, all of these things and many, many others can cause you untold trouble.

Why Is Buying Real Estate Different?

No other property has a useful life that compares with the life of land. Owners die, new ones succeed, but land goes on forever. Owners of goods may change their location at will, but land is immovable.

Being both permanent and immovable, land lends itself to the absorption of innumerable rights. Over the ages, this so impressed lawyers and jurists that they formed separate body of laws for land. These laws, creating many types of rights in land, are so numerous and so complex that it is impossible in the very nature of things for there to be a mathematical certainty of ownership.

For example, every lawyer is aware there there may be hidden defects in titles to land of which they cannot take cognizance in their opinion: defects arising from fraud, forgery, insufficiency of deeds, persons of unsound mind, demands of missing heirs, widow's/widower's dower, rights of divorced persons, rights of a child born after the making of a will, and many other circumstances that are liable to cause serious financial loss to the buyer of real estate.