Chain of Title

Ok, so you're a new colonist on mars. You had a home waiting for you in the center of town on arrival that you bought before leaving earth. You paid $100,000 because that's the going price for such a place. It has two underground stories, a garage for about four vehicle, many large rooms, a 50m hobby farm on top (providing a shirt sleeve garden) and all utilities which provides life support for 3 to 4 long term and dozens on short term (for hosting parties of course) sitting on a half acre plot. You're happy with the place and the community. You need furniture, but that will happen in time. You don't have any vehicles either, everything available has already been snapped up. But you can buy all the parts of a tractor for $8,000 and a friend has already offered to help put it together which will only take about a day or two. He's done it many times before.

But all the good property is in town and your one sq. km. claim is about ten km. away in an undeveloped neighborhood. Time for some horse trading.

You go to the land registry office and find many others there as well. You could have stayed at home and conducted business on your networked computer but you like the personal touch when trading. There are big maps on the walls and you find some property you're interested in. As everyone knows value of property is mostly location, location, location. So you post an offer of 40 acres of your property for 20 acres in town. After shooting the breeze and several cups of coffee most of the morning you've gotten no nibbles, so you adjust the offer to 40 for 10, then finally 30 for 5 which finds you a person willing to trade.

You both have to wait in line to register the transfer but soon another link in a chain of title is on the record and you now have land with a better potential for earlier development. Did you make a good deal? You may not know for years. However, you notice somebody eyeing the map around your old property. She must have a claim that's even farther out. Time for some more horse trading.

Tomorrow you'd better get that tractor built... you've got land to develop.