I tried to explain that in the last paragraph. Some people might want the features of distributed ledger such as less transaction costs and/or convenience of recording property transfers without requiring without filing papers with the government. Or the decentralized ledger assures public immutable records whereas with the central db, you have to trust there won't be a malicious government employee changing database data to fake ownership records.

Sure, in a limited sense... every distributed ledger use case can be replaced with a centralized database. The reason people would choose a distributed solution is to bypass the controls of the centralized authority. Similar reasons that bitcoin proponents prefer it over centralized fiat government currency.

Whether those distributed reasons are cost-effective or sensible remains to be seen. Who knows, maybe distributed ledgers will become so mainstream that it will be the county governments themselves that seed the real estate blockchain so they don't have to bother administering a central db.

(To be clear, I'm not trying to convince anyone of switching to distributed ledgers but laying out possible use cases.)