As HousingWire recently reported, the fragmentation across 3,000-plus local registries has created a multibillion-dollar opening for deed fraud. When ownership data is siloed and verification relies on manual oversight, the system becomes a playground for bad actors. Digitization was supposed to fix this, but moving a paper deed to a PDF doesn't change the underlying vulnerability. If a fraudulent signature is recorded digitally, the speed of the system simply makes the fraud harder to claw back.
If you don't have the paperwork from 15 years ago when you deregulated a unit, when the rent was $900, and now you're charging $6,000 He didn't need to finish the sentence, because rent-stabilized owners know exactly what he's talking about: the risk of having to pay a tenant years' worth of overcharges because they can't document renovations that removed a unit from stabilization, back when that was allowed.
"The Greenbelt-related appeals offer a clear example and cautionary tale about the consequences of inadequate recordkeeping. When key government decisions are not properly documented, transparency suffers, and with it, public trust."