There are ways to ensure the correct transfer of ownership without involving a third party. You can see these principles at work on some trading platforms already, be it for Magic cards or something else where parties cannot trust each other because they do not know each other.
Next, you would expect that the notary would educate participants and act as a source of trust, an actor in your best interest, but that is not the case. Notaries can change contracts until the last minute, and unless agreed upon, the common 14-day withdrawal period for contracts does not apply to things like buying property. Furthermore, if you are inexperienced, you can easily fall into traps.
As a concrete example, when buying a part of a shared property, it is commonly believed that the "Hausordnung" (house rules) is the owners' agreement for house rules. However, that is not the case, as there can be more, and in our case, it forbade us to keep dogs. Now, you could argue that we should have made ourselves more familiar with the law, and I would agree that is true. However, it begs the question, why do we need a notary?
> There are ways to ensure the correct transfer of ownership without involving a third party. You can see these principles at work on some trading platforms already, be it for Magic cards or something else where parties cannot trust each other because they do not know each other.
So what else is that "trading platform" then, if not a "third party"?
The way in which this problem is solved is by introducing a third party that is trusted by both, seller and buyer. There's nothing wrong with this principle. What's wrong specifically with regard to notarys as a third party in property sales in Germany is that the amount of work involved in being this third party does not really scale linearly with the value of the thing to be transferred, but the system by which the price of the notaries' work is determined assumes that a property transfer is twice as laborious (and thus must be twice as expensive) if the property is twice as expensive as some other property. Which is BS.
Indeed, my mistake and agree. Here, I wanted to refer to the fact that the transfer of ownership could likely be done even without involving a notary or a human in a properly digitalized system.
In that case you have the entity operating and maintaining the "digitalized system" which is the third party that everyone has to trust. And that entity won't do its work for free either. And it also will somehow "involve humans" which are working there.
Oh, and please don't suggest to "simply put it on a blockchain". I don't have the time to explain for the millionth' time why that doesn't work with physical properties. I consider that to be common knowledge among HN users after about 10 years of having those discussions regularly.
Also, property ownership can get ridiculously complex really fast. If just one person owns something, that's simple. But in reality, quite often multiple persons own something together (sometimes some of these persons aren't even humans, but legal entities). In that case there are a gazillion different ways in which such shared ownership can be implemented, with far-reaching implications with regard to what will happen if people disagree, split up, modify or sell the property further down the road. You cannot simply model this complexity with an SQL database because it involves legal contracts that specify the details in which a properties' ownership is shared exactly. And the notary is actually responsible in such a case to write these contracts, ensure that every participant knows about their role and rights within these contracts and isn't shortchanged.
Side question: why don't i hear horror stories about identity theft from those areas that have those evil bureaucratic notaries authenticating everything?
Actually there's been at least one known case of someone "stealing" an entire building worth about 6 million € in Berlin. Even bureaucracy and notaries didn't prevent it, so there's your potential 100% fraud prevention rate going down the drain...
Next, you would expect that the notary would educate participants and act as a source of trust, an actor in your best interest, but that is not the case. Notaries can change contracts until the last minute, and unless agreed upon, the common 14-day withdrawal period for contracts does not apply to things like buying property. Furthermore, if you are inexperienced, you can easily fall into traps.
As a concrete example, when buying a part of a shared property, it is commonly believed that the "Hausordnung" (house rules) is the owners' agreement for house rules. However, that is not the case, as there can be more, and in our case, it forbade us to keep dogs. Now, you could argue that we should have made ourselves more familiar with the law, and I would agree that is true. However, it begs the question, why do we need a notary?