It wasn’t all that long ago that the title and settlement services industry was 100% manual. Typewriters, couriers, faxes and, above all, manual labor were essentially how it all got done. Even during the early days of desktop PCs, ours was primarily an industry of stacks of paper and accordion folders (remember those?).
As we moved deeper into the 2000’s, that started to change. Yes, the title industry was a bit slower than other industries to adopt automation, but eventually, things like a title production platform, online title searches and digitally prepared title reports became industry standards.
Yes there are still some holdouts out there who prefer using spreadsheets or legal pads instead of technology. And yes, there are still parts to just about every title agent’s workflow that require some form of manual keystroking or stare-and-compare. By and large, however, the most successful title businesses are increasingly finding newer and better ways to optimize their tech stacks.
Which leads to a different problem.
When tech leads to silos
Technology, in any industry, exists to help people do a better job. It’s used to take on dull, repetitive processes, getting them done more quickly and easily so that people can handle the complex things. Tech should be used to deliver better experiences; improve overall performance and enable us to amplify our efforts.
Today’s title business owner is faced with hundreds of options when it comes to which tech to use and how. There are seemingly thousands of SaaS options. Everyone seems to have their own app. Or platform. Or portal.
And then there’s the overlap. How many hundreds of “solutions” are we offered, each one seemingly shinier than the last? How many technologies compete in what they can do and whom they serve? The poor real estate broker or agent with a few dozen clients likely has just as many title agency apps and portals (read: operational silos), each one with its own U & P and unique quirks. Of course, few of them work in conjunction with other apps or portals, leaving the REALTOR or the loan officer to fumble with passwords, multi-factor authentication and other crazy-making tasks when what they want is a fast, easy result. It’s enough to drive entire real estate teams and brokerages away from some of their title agencies (and occasionally does).
Let’s not forget the reality that some of these shiny technologies are little more than vaporware. More than a few sunk costs have started with an amazing demo and breathtaking promises, only to give way to a lack of employee buy-in; or the realization that the latest “global” solution actually has huge gaps between what was advertised and how it fits your particular business. Even worse, maybe you already had technology or partners/vendors capable of doing some or most of the things that expensive new technology or SaaS was supposed to do.
How often have we said “that’s a really cool, new technology…I need to find a way to use it?” How many times has that ended with us screaming at our screens because the one out of 600 passwords we need at that moment is in our other Google profile? How much bouncing from app to app, portal to portal, silo to silo happens because of “shiny new tech?”
How many of those investments, customizations and integrations in which we invest truly improve our operations or our client service?
Better service through technology curation
This is not a neo-Luddistic call to go back to couriers and carrier pigeons instead of technology. Far from it. But it is a call to better understand that the best title businesses are curators of technology. We don’t exist for the tech. Instead, it’s up to use to find and use the technology most helpful, in the long run, at better serving our clientele. Ours is a service-based business. Our clients should never have to work to adapt to our technology.
The fact is, we can’t build it all. Remember when “end-to-end” was the Holy Grail, just waiting for Amazon or Google or Wal-Mart or some other 800 pound gorilla to storm into our industry and build/deliver it?
We’re still waiting for that. In the meantime—which will likely be a long, long time—it’s on us to curate what we do have and figure out how to best combine it to serve our clients.