The Business Challenges Title Agents Face in 2023 (and How to Fix Them)

Title and settlement agents have demanding jobs. 

Between title searches, closing real estate transactions, and acting as an escrow officer, there is a lot of manual work to do and not enough hours in the day.

As a title agent, you become the face of a deal once the lender clears the loan to close. You must juggle countless tasks, keep pace, travel, maintain continuous communication with all parties, and deliver a 5-star experience. It would be an understatement to say that these tasks are not without their challenges. 

Throughout this blog, we explore the top three business challenges that title agents face today and how to solve them.

Business Challenge #1: Not enough time in the day

Time, regardless of your position or industry, is the rarest commodity. Title and settlement agents are no strangers to this scarce resource, especially when reviewing their lengthy to-do lists.

Why it’s a challenge

No matter how streamlined your process is or how many hours you can dedicate to your craft per week, there is not enough time in the day to get everything done. This only intensifies when real estate transaction volume increases because the paper mortgage closing process is manual, slow, and static.

What can you do?

Before you think that all hope is lost, let us share some good news with you—mortgage technology can significantly help eliminate manual to-dos from your list and instantly add time to your day. Time better spent servicing customers, building relationships with lending and real estate partners, and growing the business.  

Let’s take the Stavvy platform, for example. Title agents can leverage the eClosing solution to conduct flexible, fast, and convenient real estate closings in one secure digital location. This solution can drastically reduce closing costs for your lending partners, impress homeowners looking for digital closing options, and automate manual tasks like scheduling, annotating, traveling, printing, scanning, shipping, and so much more. 

Jim Milinkovich, Operations Director at The Title Team, recently shared feedback on eClosings with Stavvy. "The signing process was done in about 15 minutes. The whole infrastructure made it simple for us and became a cost-saving model. In the long term, we can save more time, do more closings, and eliminate the mileage expense of sending our staff out to remote locations."

Business Challenge #2: Delivering an exceptional customer experience at scale

Real estate is a relationship business; no one knows that better than title agents. Homeowners, lenders, and real estate agents want you to create a frictionless closing experience. However, this can be a tall order to fill due to the paper mortgage closing process, despite best intentions and efforts.

Why it’s a challenge

The paper mortgage process makes it hard to support every customer the way you wish you could. While waiting for paper documents to be sent in the mail, traveling to multiple closings a day, or waiting in line at county recorder’s offices, there’s not much time left to spend with clients and partners. 

In addition to waiting on paper documents to arrive from the lender, you risk delaying a closing or inadvertently sharing personal and financial information due to shipping delays or lost packages. These common paper risks can leave a permanent stain on your business.

What can you do?

Investing in mortgage technology can put you back in the driver's seat of your business and avoid post-closing documentation requests from your lender. On a Finside Chats podcast, Chuck Cain, Senior Vice President for the FNF National Agency Operations, described the latter situation best. “Everybody in the title and settlement industry knows that the one thing you dread is getting that letter or FedEx from a lender 30, 45, 60 days after closing saying, ‘We forgot this document or the borrower didn't sign with their middle initial, can you run out and get this signed again?’”

If solving for this common quality control problem isn’t enough to sway you or you’re hesitant to invest because you’re unsure if clients are interested in eClosing options, here are a few data points that are hard to ignore. 

About 30% of U.S adults are almost constantly online. Whether that means updating social media or ordering takeout for dinner, consumers are comfortable making purchases and communicating digitally. 

eClosing with remote online notarization (RON) is the natural progression for the real estate and mortgage industry. It allows businesses to scale and deliver a great experience, evidenced by a recent ALTA survey showing that 62% of companies offering RON today believe this closing option will increase over the next year.

We built the Stavvy platform to help title agents like you deliver secure digital closings at scale. From easy-to-use features like eSign, RON, IPEN, and our Eligibility Engine, title agents have the tools and compliance guardrails they need to automate manual tasks, eliminate the post-closing paper chase, and deliver personalized closings at scale. 

Morgan Foley, a business development specialist at Broker’s Title, shared that she had signers and real estate agents who, after performing an eClosing with RON in the Stavvy platform for the first time, asked when they could do it again because it was so easy and convenient. 

Business Challenge #3: Growing the business

If you’re expected to spend all this time manually maintaining communication, coordinating closings, conducting title searches, traveling to and from closings, and waiting on paper documents to be shipped, dedicating time to growing the business tumbles to the bottom of the to-do list. For those that can make it a priority, it most likely comes at the expense of personal time.

Why it’s a challenge

If you guessed the paper mortgage process, you’re right. Are you beginning to notice a recurring theme here? The current way of doing things is time-consuming and slow because of our heavy reliance on paper, postage, and physical hand-offs.

What can you do?

No surprises here, but mortgage technology transforms the paper mortgage process, saving you time so that you can grow your business. By freeing up your time and human resources with easy scheduling, eSign, document management, and RON, title agents can work on growing the business, beginning with partnering with top lending partners on digital closing initiatives. 

Investing in mortgage technology and getting RON-ready today can help you position yourself as the go-to eClosing resource for your mortgage lending and realtor partners. Cain reminds the title and settlement industry that, “Lenders want to try to find some way to keep loans profitable. And the way to do that is through digital transactions and by seamlessly integrating with a title and settlement provider's eClosing solution. And by going digital, they can implement quality control and quality assurance in real time throughout the transaction.”

An eClosing platform designed to save time

Stavvy’s eClosing solution was created to help title agents simplify and speed up the real estate and mortgage closing process. With features like eSign, RON, IPEN, and Eligibility Engine available in one secure platform, you’ll have everything you need at your fingertips to kick manual tasks to the curb and focus dedicated time on your clients and lending partners. 

The Stavvy platform is the only product you’ll need to finish a compliant eClosing in 20 minutes and grow into the next phase of your business. Supported by RON experts and onboarding specialists, our support team walks you through every step of the process to ensure you’re ready to hit the ground running. 

Learn more about how the is taking real estate beyond documents.