Tuesday, July 28, 2026

One of the earliest blogs I posted here was about Chesterton’s Fence, the idea that before removing something that appears unnecessary, we should first understand why it was put there in the first place. Sometimes what looks like inefficiency is actually the solution to a problem we’ve forgotten existed. Its very success can make the original problem almost invisible. Before we tear down the fence, we should understand what it has been protecting.

That thought came back to me last week.

Romania’s National Agency for Cadastre and Land Registration (ANCPI), the government agency responsible for maintaining that entire country’s official and centralized land ownership records and mapping system, confirmed that its e-Terra platform was the target of a cyberattack. The platform serves as Romania’s national electronic land registry, supporting property registrations and real estate transactions across the country. When it was taken offline, much of the nation’s land registration activity effectively came to a standstill while officials assessed the damage and began attempting to restore service. The attacker claimed to have wiped the entire database after a failed extortion attempt and offered the stolen data for sale on hacker forums on the dark web. Romanian authorities have confirmed the cyberattack but have not verified all of the hacker’s claims, and they report that offline backups are being used to restore the system.

The investigation will determine exactly what happened. Perhaps the damage will prove less severe than initially feared. Perhaps it will be worse. Either way, the incident brought much of Romania’s land registration system to a halt and disrupted access to the official system used to record and verify land ownership throughout an entire country.

It would be easy to suppose that the lesson is simply to invest more in cybersecurity. Of course we should. But I think there is another lesson hiding underneath this one.

For years, we’ve measured progress in real estate by how much friction we can remove. More integration. More interoperability. More consolidation. Fewer systems. Fewer places to look. One source of truth.

Those are worthwhile goals. They make transactions faster, easier, and sometimes less expensive. But every time we concentrate more of our industry’s critical infrastructure into fewer places, we should also ask what new risks we are creating. Centralization doesn’t merely change efficiency; it changes dependency. It changes who controls critical infrastructure. And it changes the consequences when that infrastructure fails.

What happens when the one source of truth is suddenly unavailable?

It’s an architectural question. Every system is designed with tradeoffs. We tend to celebrate efficiency because its benefits are immediate and measurable. Resilience is harder to appreciate because, on most days, it looks a lot like unnecessary redundancy. Until the day you need it.

Just like insurance, it’s an easy thing to do without – until you’re without it and need it.

In the United States, our public land records have never been maintained in one national repository. They are recorded locally under state law in thousands of county recording offices. Anyone who has worked across multiple jurisdictions knows that this can be frustrating. Different recording requirements. Different software vendors. Different indexing practices. Different fee structures. If you’ve ever wished the entire system were centralized and standardized, you’re certainly not alone.

Yet that very fragmentation creates something engineers of every stripe have long recognized as valuable: resilience.

One of the strengths of America’s recording system is that there is no master switch.

It wasn’t designed that way as a cybersecurity strategy, of course. Our system evolved through a federal framework in which states, and ultimately counties, became the custodians of land records. What history produced for reasons of governance may also provide an unexpected measure of resilience. A disruption in one jurisdiction never becomes a disruption everywhere.

A ransomware attack against a county recorder’s office can be devastating for that community. A natural disaster can disrupt recording operations. Hardware can fail. Networks can go down. Those events matter, and they deserve every resource we can devote to preventing and recovering from them.

But they generally remain local.

Closings continue in neighboring counties. Lenders continue making loans in other states. The rest of the country’s land records remain available because there is no single point whose failure brings the entire system to a halt.

I’m not arguing against modernization, far from it. The title and settlement industry has benefited tremendously from technology, and we should continue pursuing innovations that make transactions more secure, more transparent and more efficient.  But modernization and concentration are not necessarily the same thing. We can build better systems without assuming they must all depend on the same platform, the same repository or the same provider.

That question extends well beyond county recording offices. As our industry increasingly relies on large property data repositories, cloud providers, payment platforms, identity verification services, AI tools and other shared infrastructure, we should be asking not only how well these systems perform on an ordinary Tuesday, but also how they perform on the day something goes terribly wrong.

Every time more of the industry depends on a single ecosystem, we gain efficiencies. We also increase our dependence on that ecosystem. Sometimes those tradeoffs are worthwhile. Sometimes the most efficient design also proves to be the most resilient. But not always. The challenge is recognizing the difference before we discover it the hard way.

That’s why Chesterton’s Fence came back to mind.

Before we decide that every land record, every title search, every identity verification, every payment rail or every property dataset should ultimately flow through a single ecosystem, perhaps we should pause to ask what purpose today’s distributed architecture has been serving all along.

Every generation inherits institutions that seem inefficient compared to the technologies of the day. Some deserve to be replaced. Others deserve to be understood before they are redesigned.

Knowing the difference may be one of the most important decisions we make, intentionally or inadvertently, for the future of real estate.

Until Next Time,

Mary Schuster
Chief Knowledge Officer
October Research, LLC