(And, from similar cases in the UK which has this system, if the land registry fucks up the transfer is still final and this has been upheld by the court, the government may just be liable for damages)
This is also true of county clerks in the US: any transfer of property in the county has to be recorded on a deed that is submitted to the county clerk and kept on file by them. Otherwise it hasn't happened.
> if the land registry fucks up the transfer is still final
This is the part that might not be the same in all US jurisdictions (though it appears it is the same in some, someone posted upthread about Iowa having a system like this).
As I pointed out in a reply to that comment, that's a popular misconception – legally, Iowa uses essentially the same land title system as every other US state; the main difference is instead of private title insurance, there is a state government monopoly on title insurance. But Iowans use the phrase "title insurance" to mean "private title insurance", making many of them wrongly think their state doesn't have title insurance at all.
Several US states previously enacted Torrens title, but largely unsuccessfully – few titles were ever converted to Torrens, and in almost all of them Torrens title is either repealed or effectively moribund.
The only place under US jurisdiction where Torrens title is fully mainstream, is Guam. Guam adopted it in the early 20th century, around the same time as the US territories of Hawaii and the Philippines did. It survived in the Philippines, but the Philippines became an independent country. In Hawaii, it was successful in a few parts of the state (in particular Lānaʻi), but otherwise largely not.
No, the point is that this is actually not true. The transfer has happened as soon as the deed has been executed. There are many reasons you generally want to record the deed in a timely fashion, but doing so is not strictly necessary.
It is in Florida, which is where I live. Florida Statutes section 695.01:
"No conveyance, transfer, or mortgage of real property, or of any interest therein, nor any lease for a term of 1 year or longer, shall be good and effectual in law or equity against creditors or subsequent purchasers for a valuable consideration and without notice, unless the same be recorded according to law"
I can't say whether every US state has similar law in place, but I suspect most of them do, since both the State and the county clerks get revenue from the recording fees.
By my lay reading of that, it doesn't even actually necessitate recording the deed sooner for it to have those effects - rather it just means that the deed needs to have been recorded some time before you get to court.
> it just means that the deed needs to have been recorded some time before you get to court.
No, before whatever event happens that might trigger a lawsuit.
For example (hypothetical as far as I know): say I purchase a property from a fraudulent seller. They promise me they'll record the deed after it's signed and notarized by both of us, but they never do so. (Of course I'd be stupid to do things this way, but maybe I'm a real cheapskate and want to save on title company fees.) Then they sell it to someone else. In order for my ownership rights to be protected by Florida law, I would have had to see that the deed was not recorded, and do it myself (and pay the recording fee), before the date of the second sale. Before the date of the court hearing to challenge the second sale would not be sufficient.
It's true that, in a typical closing in Florida (and in every other state where I've bought real property), the closing takes place at the title company's office, their notary notarizes all the documents and gives me copies before I leave, and I get the key to the house at the end of that. I don't have to wait until the deed is recorded with the county to take possession.
My question would be, how does a closing work in jurisdictions that have Torrens title? Does the closing have to take place at the land registry, so they can confirm that everything is checked and valid and recorded before I get the key to the house?
I'll accept that interpretation. But that's still just a patch over the underlying semantics trying to eliminate a lot of thorny cases, not a full change in semantics.
For example, let's say 12/31 is a Sunday. The seller wishes to sell the property this year for tax purposes. The seller executes the purchase agreement and the deed on 12/31, and then only records the deed on 1/2 (when the registry reopens). For purpose of taxes, that is still treated as a sale in the earlier year, right?
> My question would be, how does a closing work in jurisdictions that have Torrens title? Does the closing have to take place at the land registry, so they can confirm that everything is checked and valid and recorded before I get the key to the house?
I have no idea. It seems like the main difference with Torrens title is that when the deed is accepted by the registry then you know it is authoritative. So a closing at an attorney's office with delayed recording has the same ambiguity under both systems. The difference would be that when the deed is confirmed recorded under Torrens, that ambiguity has been fully resolved. Whereas under non-Torrens that ambiguity hangs around indefinitely, insured against by title insurance, and eventually [mostly] extinguished by adverse possession.
To the best of my knowledge, yes, the date of closing, which is the date on which the deed is executed, is the date of sale for tax purposes. Note, however, that at least in the US, the IRS doesn't check what you claim the date of sale is unless you are audited, and I never have been. What would happen in an audit under your hypothetical, I can't say.
> a closing at an attorney's office with delayed recording has the same ambiguity under both systems.
Yes, that's why I asked if such a closing is even allowed under a Torrens system--it seems like it would defeat a key purpose of the system, which is to make sure that the land registry's records always are the "single source of truth" for who owns what.
> which is to make sure that the land registry's records always are the "single source of truth" for who owns what.
I think you're coming at this from a tech perspective of fully authoritative digital databases a little too much. Look at the ambiguity that remains after a non-Torrens transfer, and after a Torrens transfer. Eliminating that is the main point of Torrens title. It still can't solve the entire problem and be a "single source of truth" the way we see things in the tech world.
That Florida statute would seem to eliminate a good chunk of that ambiguity as well, but not all.
Also no, state tax codes can be pretty complex as well. On this particular issue, I had trouble finding an attorney who would represent me for less than $10k (while still equivocating about the merits of my position!), so I represented myself. It took a twenty minute phone call with two state tax agents to come to an amicable agreement. A++ would get taxed again.
I've previously been one to echo negative sentiment about government bureaucracy, but the times I've had to deal with it (not the IRS thankfully but rather a few other federal agencies) the agents have been generally helpful and empowered to act authoritatively. They're still part of a bureaucracy of course, with some of the laughable things that entails, but ultimately still human beings with some leeway to act.
For the most part I think the negative narrative has been informed by corporate bureaucracies getting really bad (IVRs, offshoring, bottomless ticket systems, now LLMs, etc) and so we're all assuming that the government simply must be worse. But it's not. (well maybe it is now after the DOGE arsonists brought so-called "corporate efficiency", I don't actually know)
I'm not sure what those have to do with this question, since it's a legal question, not an accounting question.
> I feel pretty confident that if a state tax authority agrees with the deed date being the transfer date, then the IRS would as well.
In many cases a state tax authority wouldn't even be involved, since many states don't tax capital gains (which is what would be involved with a home sale) while the US Federal government does.
> negative sentiment about government bureaucracy
Evidently your experiences with government bureaucracies have been very, very different from mine.
I mentioned my experience with a state tax authority because it is direct personal experience about this very topic. I don't know why you turned that into being about the IRS, and are now even seemingly rejecting the state tax authority "being involved". The date of the transfer was directly relevant to my disagreement with the state tax authority, and they didn't question that date being the deed date even though the recording happened some time later. Either believe me or not, I don't care.
> Evidently your experiences with government bureaucracies have been very, very different from mine.
Sure? I'm not saying they were a some pleasant, responsive, quick, and casual experience - rather much less bad than I was expecting. And dealing with some corporate bureaucracies has been much worse, with constant transferring and calling back every week to check on status and make sure a ticket didn't get stuck and timeout, etc.
Um, because that's what I orginally began talking about when the topic of taxes came up? Go back and look at the first post of mine in this subthread where I explicitly mentioned the IRS. You brought up state tax authorities after that, not before.
> and are now even seemingly rejecting the state tax authority "being involved".
If you sell a home in a state that doesn't tax capital gains--such as the state I live in, and indeed every state in which i have sold a home--then the state tax authority is not involved. Which is what I already explicitly said.
> Sure?
Quite sure. I never assumed your experience was "pleasant, responsive, quick and casual"--indeed, your "much less bad than I was expecting" was how I already had read your previous post. And that experience is, as I said, very, very different from experiences I have had with government bureaucracies (not all such experiences, but enough of them that they are not outliers), for which the most charitable description I could give would be "much, much worse than I was expecting".
> dealing with some corporate bureaucracies has been much worse
I certainly have had bad experiences with corporate bureaucracies as well, and I was in no way implying that they are any better than government bureaucracies. My average experience with both is probably about the same.