Voice of the Title Agent (VOTA) Panel from the 2012 NSSCS – Part III – Marketplace & Business Improvement
Coming from Southwest Florida – virtually the epicenter of the housing crisis – and starting our business when we did – January, 2007 – gives us an interesting perspective. We struggled mightily at the outset and were fortunately lean enough to survive. We survived long enough to establish a very high quality and well-respected brand, and began to grow our market share by innovating.
Short Sale Orchestration Department
Most of our success and growth over the last two and half years has come from the development of a short sale orchestration department.
We call it lien clearance or title processing on steroids, and we currently employ four full time people whose responsibility it is to work with REALTORs, short sellers, and their lenders to get the lenders in short sales to provide a lien release so that we may issue title insurance.
Our team recently discussed this suite of services and, in light of what we have seen in the market – slight increases in values, e.g. – we would like to see our short sale work comprise a much smaller percentage of our revenue in about one year. We are therefore ratcheting up our sales and marketing focus on more traditional work (settlement and closing services) driven from lenders on the refinance side and from REALTORs on the purchase and sale side.
