I work in the un-glamorous side of real-estate transactions — namely, I work in title insurance. We provide peace of mind. Yadda yadda yadda…

A great deal of monotonous work goes into clearing title to property you wish to acquire, or wish to refinance, etc… Thanks to the Patriot Act, (which, I might add, has increased the amount of paperwork required in all real estate transactions) and probably a heap of other legislative garbage, here’s the latest addition, which will probably cost us one man/hour of labor daily.

This is how it works: Basically, the DOJ or Homeland security places a secret lien against your property, one that isn’t really searchable in public records, but only on a Government database. At our meeting to disuss this, I posed the following question:

What are our procedures when (if) this ever occurs (and it might, we service Wayne County, home to Dearborn, MI, which has the largest concentration of Arabs outside of the Fertile Crescent)? I mean, presumably, if you’re on this list, you’re either A) a bonafide terrorist, aware of the nature of your operations and hence, not likely to draw attention to your cell by engaging in transactions of this nature, or the far more likely scenario, B) you’re on the list and you’re not a terrorist, and you don’t know you’re on the list.

So, how do we go about informing a propective buyer that he/she has a federal terrorist lien filed against them in some clandestine federal database?

The long and short of it is: it’s an underwriting decision – and we will just refuse their business without offering an explanation. Occam’s razor suggests that this is an actuarial solution, mitigating the insurer’s risk according to our underwriting guidelines. But it’s probably not that easy.