Bad Pennies and Title Agents

Bad Title Agents are like bad pennies - they keep coming back.

If you’ve been in the title business long enough, you’ve heard the story: A Title Agent bends the rules, overcharges clients, skims money, or participates in fraud (multiple choice, pick all that apply). Their underwriter discovers a problem, scratches the surface and decides that they want no more of the relationship. The relationship is cancelled.

Game over for the agent? Not even. No charges are filed, no licenses are revoked, and the bad penny Agent stays in business. In many cases, it doesn’t even slow them down.

The Agent may only lose one of several underwriters. Underwriters talk, but they don’t always share. Concerned about litigation, they leave their peers to their own discovery. There’s no clearing house of agent information and no one is keeping score. The other underwriters may not even suspect there’s a problem with the agent.

Occasionally another underwriter comes rushing in, knowing of the problem, but deliberately overlooking it. The bad penny still has a license and a book of business. If you have the tolerance for risk, why not, there’s money to be made.

And there are underwriters who just don’t want to know – don’t ask, don’t tell. If you don’t go looking for it, you can’t find it. The premiums keep flowing.

The details don’t really matter, the result is the same - an entire industry starts to look sleazy.

The title industry needs to weed out the bad pennies and do it now. There’s been talk about standards (Source of Title, Title-opoly), but standards are empty words unless someone enforces them. There are those in the industry who have problems with following the rules, let alone moving to the higher plane of standards. Let’s clean that up first.

Agents and those who care about industry need to take a stand:

Support those who support the industry. Let the underwriters know that looking the other way isn’t acceptable anymore. The bad pennies hurt the consumer and hurt the industry. If your underwriter doesn’t seem interested, vote with your feet – find an underwriter who is interested in protecting the industry.

Lobby legislators and regulators personally and through our professional organizations to:

End the Secrets. Allow the underwriters to share information about cancellations for cause without fear of litigation.

Get the Bad Pennies out of our Business. Revoke the licenses of those involved in misdeeds. Forever.

Keep them out of Real Estate. Change or modify the governing laws so that those found guilty of misdeeds cannot practice law, or hold licenses for mortgage, real estate or appraisal. Otherwise, like cockroaches, they will scurry to a dark corner of the industry and continue business as usual.

Prosecute. Insist that those that violate the law be turned over to the authorities and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

We need to clean up the industry and do it now before someone else comes in and decides to clean it up for us. We won’t like it.


From:http://clearingtitle.wordpress.com/