No, I Can't Give You Any Documents!

I started in the title business 28 years ago. Those were the good old days. I began in customer service for Safeco Title Co. and delivered all kinds of documents and reports. One of those reports was called a property profile.

The property profile in those days included a copy of the tax roll and a grant deed and maybe a printout of some sales comparables for the area. All of these were printed from microfiche and certainly took time to put together.

Over the years these property profiles have grown to include;

• neighborhood information
• demographics
• copies of open trust deeds
• sales comps and maps that locate those comps
• plat maps
• aerial maps

Yesterday was a huge announcement in my world. The department of insurance issued an opinion almost all of these tools we have been supplying we are now no longer allowed to provide.

The only item our compliance people are letting us supply now is the tax roll information. This seems crazy to me, 28 years ago when I first got in to this business I was able to provide more than that. In order to get any of these documents in the future someone has to actually be in an escrow with us.

So a realtor can not ask us for a copy of a grant deed before going on a listing appointment to make sure they are meeting with the correct parties. We can no longer send someone a copy of a notice of default or a copy of a trust deed which have always been used to help the consumer.

We are being told that our customers only option is to sign up for a service that will cause them to pay for these documents. I worry about these services having the necessary expertise to deliver the correct documents. After all it takes our people years of training to find these documents before making copies of them. I am truly concerned that this could be a real problem for consumers.

My thoughts and concerns don't matter though!

The last 24 hours has been filled with delivering this message to our many customers. They have all been great and didn't take any shots at the messenger (me).

Many customers had one question I honestly don't have a real good answer for. That question is why can't you give us copies of deeds or maps? These are some of the very basic tools that we have readily available.

Maybe one of you reading this has an answer. I would love to hear it.

For those of you in California I would also love to hear what your title company representatives are telling you.

Title Wizard? Not Yet!

I have to admit it took me a week or so to figure out how to approach this topic. If you didn't hear last week the Dept of Insurance in California in conjunction with The California Land Title Association launched a website aimed at consumers called TitleWizard. The site is in response to the DOI asserting that there is no competition in our industry and the way we do market our products is through an elaborate number of kick backs to builders, brokers and lenders. More on that topic on a future post. The new website will allow the general public to get a quick quote on a transaction they are doing. Essentially the site is pretty user friendly and lets a seller or agent or even a lender get a quick quote on title insurance. There are a few challenges that I think the site is going to face. First off, the information the quotes are being generated from needs to be accurate. My understanding is that each title ins. co. is responsible for putting in their own rates. Believe me, there is going to be a learning curve. I have noticed with my own company that some of the rates are not currently quoted correctly. Secondly if you are doing business in a county like Santa Barbara where the title co. not only produces the title insurance but the escrow service is done as well, a quote on escrow fees would be very important. The escrow fees are not posted on the site yet and that will probably take a bit of time. The last and probably not least of all these challenges is that if someone picks a company specifically because of the lower price and that company does not provide the services they were asked to provide I think the consumer is going to be faced with time, effort and possibly money to correct issues caused by a company that was chosen specifically because they were the low cost provider. I will continue to argue that the competition in my industry is based on service. This service by the professionals involved in my industry shouldn't be overlooked because of a few dollars. With respects to the protection someone is getting for our service the one time fee they are having to pay is a bargain. It will be interesting to see what complaints the Department of Insurance may get because they essentially recommended the low cost provider to someone that used the site to choose their Title Co. See You In Escrow!