The “the title insurance industry” is “an obscure corner of the real estate world,” according to The New York Slimes. So it’s a measure of New York State’s totalitarianism that its tyrants stringently regulate this “corner,” especially the prices these companies can charge for their products. In fact, even the socialist Slimes admits that since title-insurance firms can’t compete via price, they do so “by dangling an array of perks for real estate developers and other mortgage-industry insiders.” Their largesse ranges from dinners at expensive restaurants to tickets for sports or cultural events to some truly over-the-top extravaganzas (such as the night with the New York Mets that the article’s lede describes).
No wonder, then, that New York’s “title insurance rates … are hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars higher than in neighboring states like Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Jersey”; in effect, buyers of property requiring title insurance (and banks usually won’t lend money without it) subsidize the title companies’ entertainment of lawyers and brokers. And that perturbs the New York State Department of Financial Services, whose bureaucrats have nothing to do all day but stick their noses into other people’s business. Why, they demand, should poor home-buyers pay for wealthy lawyers’ wining and dining?
I’ll tell you why, Bozos: because you stripped the industry of its most important differential—and one that benefitted consumers—when you fixed its rates. Ergo, if you’re serious about ending this rip-off, rescind that regulation.
Oh, but the nannies have a better idea: more regs! Yes! And so they’ve banned the firms’ freebies. Which prohibition will require whole new bureaucracies of enforcers, I’m sure.
Predictably, Our Rulers’ sympathy for the beleaguered home-buyer doesn’t extend to eliminating or even cutting New York State’s exorbitant, multiple taxes on real-estate transactions (mortgage-recording tax, real-estate transfer tax, mansion tax, etc., ad nauseam, ad infinitum).
5:00 pm on January 31, 2018
