What's interesting about our industry is our activities track in almost lockstep the natural timeline of a transaction.
So, let's talk for a few minutes about what happens before the schedules closed, the closing schedule and we know we have an active deal. Once we have an active deal, that's where we work on the title side to prepare our title commitment. We're searching who the current owner is, whether there's any outstanding mortgages liens, things like that. Are the taxes paid? Everything that affects the title and the ownership of the property. Once we get all that information together, we put together our title commitment and that title commitment is going to list all the things that are going on with the property — who owns it, what mortgages have to be released and the like. Once we have that document it moves over to the escrow side and we start clearing those requirements — things that have to get done in order for us to issue our title insurance.
What’s key is the anticipation once we see the title commitment and what's on there as far as requirements. It's anticipating how long are some of these things going to take to clear and can we stay ahead of the transaction? That's what's key to make a great closing experience. So, you know, confirming if we have somebody that is deceased. We get a death certificate or a trust certificate or we have a couple that's divorced. Whatever it happens to be. It could be a litany of things.
You know, we've got legal descriptions that don't match but that's the time that we take to say “okay, let's set this file up as far as we can before we get the call to actually schedule the closing.”
