If you watch cable TV, you may have seen ads for companies named things like TitleLock and wondered what the heck they were talking about. While I’m not endorsing their services, they are addressing a very real, and serious, issue: a gap in fraud prevention for real estate transactions.

The word “title” mostly occurs in two very specific contexts: for motor vehicles and for real estate. About the only thing the two processes have in common, though, is the word title. The process for examining motor vehicle titles is completely different from the procedure for real estate titles, including a wide variety of security checks and involving state and federal authorities in the process.

For real estate transactions, even though they can involve tens — or, possibly, hundreds — of millions of dollars? Astonishingly, there’s no national database or set of laws for tracking real estate. Instead, it depends upon a complex weave of local and state laws and regulations. Sure, the FBI may get involved in real estate fraud cases — but only if there’s interstate fraud involved and its jurisdiction kicks in. Otherwise, it will stay out of it other than lending its expertise as requested.

So, is this a real concern that’s a problem we should address? Yes, absolutely. Is it a big issue for you, personally? No, probably not. If you have a mortgage, your bank will be looking into it — it has a vested interest in doing so to protect its loan. That’s its job.

Similarly, if you live in the property, you’ll probably notice if you suddenly start getting notices of new loans or anything like that. They also won’t be able to just rent it out or sell it from underneath your feet. So, don’t freak out about this.

It is, however, a huge gap in our system that ought to be addressed. It ought to be overseen by state and/or federal authorities, just like motor vehicle titles are handled.

When you buy or sell a car the state makes sure that everything is fine for you. The state checks to prevent title fraud for you as part of its service to the taxpayers. Yes, sometimes it’s inconvenient for consumers to produce all of the documents, but ultimately it helps to protect against fraud for everybody.

Even though it involves a lot more money, no such universal system exists for real estate — and that’s insane. You may not be particularly concerned about the guy who’s got one nice house in Maine and is renting out his other property in a warm climate on the beach somewhere, making money from it. That’s understandable. They’re not necessarily the real targets, however. They can probably afford to hire a lawyer to check on it, and if they don’t, they’re just kind of being foolish.

Instead, the targets of these scams could be an elderly, single homeowner who has no other assets. If title fraud was committed against them, they might not know it until they try to sell their home — either to move into assisted living or after they pass away and their heirs are dealing with it as part of their estate.

Then they discover that there’s an outstanding lien against their house from a bank they’ve never heard of with documents nobody ever really signed. The one thing they were counting on inheriting is suddenly gone or tied up in court for years.

The solution is not, however, some kind of mandatory national real estate database, similar to what is done with vehicles. That would run into massive opposition and be virtually impossible to pass into law or enforce. Title search companies are a part of every real estate transaction, and they make money doing that work. So do lawyers, real estate agents, and everyone else who’s part of the process.

So, how do we make the process more secure without ruffling their feathers? We make it an optional opt-in system in order to cover the people who are most vulnerable, with a nominal fee to cover the cost.

Say, for $25 or $50 a year, you can opt in to this and have the government check on your property for you if it’s not being sold. That protects them without forcing them to trudge through the process of doing title searches on their own. This ought to be a simple, easy bipartisan fix that would extend the protection that the wealthy can readily afford to everyone — if our leaders had the will to make it happen.