Closing costs and cartel capture

Pulling up stakes and moving is tough enough. Regulations that drive up closing costs make things worse [Naomi Schaefer Riley/New York Post, thanks for quotes]

Cato Institute Senior Fellow Walter Olson says that it’s not just the taxes that make some states more expensive than others. “States regulate real-estate transfers so as to require additional stages and the involvement of certain professionals’ services, like lawyers’, at more stages.” He says New York is “particularly bad.”

Olson notes: “The title-insurance industry is also regulated in ways that make consumers pay much more in some states, independent of any difference in underwriting risk.”

And the “high-cost methods required in some states are stoutly defended by lobbies of professionals who make a living from the expensive way of doing things.”

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