News

Staffing Efforts The historic labor shortage is double-trouble for the title insurance industry, as we head into yet another healthy buy-sell market in 2022.  With an estimated 10M+ job openings in the U.S. coming into 2022 and only 6.5 million Americans actively looking, the title industry finds itself competing for a shrinking pool of available […]

Happy Employees We’re seeing more and more around the title industry about staffing and employee engagement. For example, our friends at ALTA hosted a webinar on the topic recently. We wrote a blog about the Great Resignation and its impact on the title industry in 2021 as well.  Plus, coming off of a huge refinance

Multi-lingual Client Communications We already know that 2022 will be a competitive year in the industry, just from the trend toward a purchase-dominated market. But another influence on how we do business may only now be emerging.  At both the federal level and in numerous states, requirements are being shaped that could require mortgage lenders

Seasonality for Title Agents One of the most fascinating elements of the real estate industry, to us anyway, has always been one of its most unique attributes: seasonality. That’s the concept that home sales transactions and prices tend to be above-trend in the summer, while that activity slows in the winter. (Thanks to NAR for

Marketing On any given work day, think about how much commercial messaging or marketing you ignore. You might start your morning with a few (dozen) digital ads popping up, unbidden, in your browser as you plow through them enroute to your desired content. You probably delete a few more of the advertising emails that actually

Customer Service in the Title Industry We’ve talked quite a bit in this space about the importance of customer service in a competitive purchase market. We’ve discussed how important it is for title agents to win (and keep) the business of real estate agents and brokers, who often hold the key to purchase mortgage referrals

Title Industry Conferences As we’ve mentioned, we’re full swing into conference season. And although the impact of the pandemic has seen to it that we’re not quite all the way back to The Way Things Were, it’s still been great to be at a number of industry conferences regardless.  By the time we post this,

Alanna Campaigns A competitive purchase market (and one likely to grow more competitive into 2022) means a lot of things for a successful title agency. It means increased customer service levels as real estate agents, borrowers and sellers climb back into the mix. It means tighter margins, although for most title agents, that’s a reality

Market and regulatory influences may finally be converging to force many title agents to a reckoning on a classic struggle between “manning the phones” for customer service and putting the staff’s nose to the grindstone to get the closing done. Many title agents will quickly tell you that customer service is job one for any

One of the many strange features of the post (late-stage?) pandemic landscape has been a wide spread labor shortage. We see it in restaurants, stores, entertainment venues…just about anywhere that requires people-powered service to keep the doors open. Sadly, in many cases, those doors are closing for lack of employees.  A title agency isn’t often