Storytelling, History, and the Future of the Title Business | Ep 101

In a world where change is the only constant, Mo Choumil stands at the forefront, guiding title professionals to not just grow their businesses, but to master the art of innovation. With every episode, you're handed the keys to unlock unparalleled growth and stay ahead of the curve. Get ready for a transformative journey. Hello everyone, and welcome to the number one podcast In the title industry, the Title Agents Podcast. Today we're joined by true storyteller and industry veteran Michael Holden, currently with AmTrust and the voice behind the longstanding blog, Ramblings of a Title Man.

Whether you follow his insights over the years or just discovering his work, Michael brings a unique blend of industry knowledge, wit, and wisdom. In this episode, we dive into the evolution of the title industry, the power of storytelling, and what the future holds for agents and underwriters alike. Let's get into it. Hello, Michael, and welcome to the podcast. Uh, I want to really thank you for taking the time to join us and share your insights.

We always, uh, start with the first question. Uh, give us a little background about where you grew up and your story. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me on the podcast today. I really appreciate it.

Uh, love what you're doing with, uh, podcast and what you're doing online to raise awareness about the title industry and some of the topics you cover. And I want to say thank you again for making that a priority. We need more, more of that in the industry. My story started in Boone County, Missouri, which is in the center of Missouri. And I was tricked into the title business.

And nobody goes to a 4th grade career day and sees somebody's mom telling how they work in the title business and decides, oh, I want to do that. You know, everybody has a story. Mine happens to be that I worked one summer in middle school for my parents pulling documents, and I didn't really like that. So I didn't work in the title company for all of high school. And when I started college, I was working at a pizza place doing pizza deliveries.

This is long before DoorDash and all the other stuff. So the calls came into the pizza parlor and they took down the address and they made the pizza and I delivered it. And so my freshman year of college, you know, I was making really good money. I mean, I was making, back then when the average wage was $3 an hour, I was averaging like $10 because I was getting paid mileage and tips and minimum wage and everything. And so I thought I was Doing great.

The problem was I wasn't getting the full college experience. My, you know, when do people order pizzas? Friday and Saturday nights. You know, all of my new friends I'd met at college were going out and doing college things. You know, I missed walking around at homecoming and seeing all the homecoming floats and everything the night before the parade and everything.

And so I go home over Thanksgiving of my freshman year of college and my parents are like, huh, You're missing out on all this stuff. Why don't you come work for the title company? All your classes end at 1 o'clock. You can come over at 1:30 and work till 5, and we'll pay you the same $10 an hour. And of course, you know, my teenage brain went into, you know, oh, this'll be great.

You know, I won't smell like pizza anymore and I'll get to do all the fun stuff and everything. And of course, my parents probably had an ulterior motive and they They got me hooked on the title business pretty early, and from there on, I've always worked in the title business since I was 19. So going on, I'll show my age, but going on 37 years now. Wow. You look like you're 37.

Thank you. So where are you currently? I believe it's AmTrust, if I'm not mistaken. AmTrust Title Insurance Company. I started with them just over a year ago.

And my career has kind of been like a first half and a second half. You know, I worked for my parents' title agency. I took over that title agency in 1997. The title agency just could not survive in the Great Recession of 2008. And we ended up closing it.

Very difficult thing to close a title agency, especially when, you know, There were some, you know, lots of things, you know, people didn't get their last paychecks. I mean, it, the company just, just went under and, um, very important, uh, learning experience. I learned how, how not to survive a recession. I made the decision at that time to move over to the underwriter side of the business. And so from 2008 on, I've worked on the underwriter side and mostly in regional and, and strategic roles to, uh, cover multiple states.

I have found that I fit in well with what I would call smaller growing underwriters, underwriters that want to sign agents, underwriters that are willing to provide more partnership than just a place to send your check. Nothing wrong with the big companies that have been around for 100 years. They have an important role in our industry and they'll continue to have an important role in our industry. I just think that the kind of the incubators of innovation are the smaller underwriters and what they're doing. Absolutely.

So your blog, Ramblings of a Title Man, has been around for quite a while. What inspired you to start writing, and what has it meant to you personally and professionally over the years? It was really another happy accident that caused that. So when I made the switch from a title agent over to working for an underwriter, The company I went to work for was a tiny underwriter based in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. And that company only had 11 employees.

I was the 11th employee and I was tasked with basically doing all the marketing and all of the agent signing for 14 states. They were up at that time, they were up to 14 states and they didn't, they had yet to create any kind of marketing platform or anything like that. So I came up with the Ramblings of a Title Man, and I started producing it in email form. And once a month I would send emails out to all of the land title email addresses from folks that I had worked with or gotten their business card or stuff like that. And I just started building my list from, from those kinds of things.

I would go to conferences. They would give me the list of the conference participants. I would add them to my list. I think I'm up to like 9,000 people that I send that out to now. It's It's been 17, 18 years.

But yeah, so I mean, it's, it's a, uh, um, and it's, so it just kind of snowballed from there. 'Cause I mean, it, it has been a, uh, and really what it's meant to me is I go places and I will, you know, introduce myself and somebody will say, oh, do you write the Ramblings of a Title Man? And I'm like, yeah. And I, I've never met them before. And yet they know me by reputation.

And that is so surreal to me. I mean, I, I'm just so grateful and so dumbfounded every time that happens. And it's, it's just a wonderful feeling. For those of you that have not had a pleasure to read or been a part of the mailing list of Michael's, it is truly a treat. It's very educational and it's also entertaining at the same time.

Yeah. And if, hey, and if you want to get it, all you got to do is reach out to me. I still send out the email once a month to my 9,000 subscribers, but I also post it on LinkedIn. So if you're like, how can I find it? Just hit me up on LinkedIn.

Just connect to me there. And you'll get it in my feed and you'll always see it. We'll also have your contact info in the show notes as well too. So looking back, what were some of the early lessons in your career that still shape your perspective today? I really thought about this and there are all kinds of stories that I could tell, but one of them, you know, that stood out in my mind that kind of popped in my mind was, you know, very early on in my career, we still searched from the courthouse and, you know, as a lowly peon at the beginning of my career, I was one of the people that had to go to the courthouse and do the searching.

It was the good old days. I did that myself. So there was a lot of camaraderie. Yeah. Yeah.

And I was there and there was this couple who was looking through the books and trying to find something. And I overheard them talking and I just kind of piped up and said, you know, and I'm a 19-year-old kid who's just, you know, 6 months on the job. Didn't really know a lot. A lot, but they say, oh yeah, we're buying this house and we're trying to look up information about it. We want to read the restrictions to see what they're saying.

I'm like, oh, I can help you. And I helped them find the building restrictions and showed them where they could get a copy of it and everything. And, you know, and I didn't even have business cards yet. So I handwrote on a sticky note my name and my title agency name and my phone number. If you ever need any more help, I'm happy to help you.

Well, that sticky note was put on top of the real estate contract when they signed their real estate contract and they demanded that their realtor use my parents' title company. And, uh, it just, one of those things is when our industry goes out of our way to help people, we can be champions for what we do and it can, it can just grow exponentially. And, uh, that was the thing I thought of when you sent me that question. So. Have you seen a shift in how title professionals perceive their role or the industry's legacy over the years?

You know, this is something that I have articulated at meetings and I've, I've, I've talked to title agents about this across the country. So my own personal history is my grandfather actually started at the age of 19 as an apprentice, uh, working for a title company in St. Louis in 1920. So this is my family's 106th year in the title business. I'm a 3rd generation title guy.

And my grandfather was able to be fully employed all through the Great Depression, you know, was able to save up enough money in the 1930s during the Depression while he had a job and everybody else didn't, that he was able to open his own title agency in 1937. Wow. And in 1937, granted, no computers, everything was done by, you know, manual process, you know, manual typewriters. If you're ever curious what a manual typewriter is, Google, you know, manual typewriter. People actually use those to type title commitments.

But back then in the 1930s and leading into the World War II years, they had 25 employees. And 24 of them were responsible for the title insurance process, searching the title, examining the title, reviewing the deeds, preparing the commitments, preparing the policies, all that stuff. And one employee was responsible for the closings. Now, back then, only about 5% of the deals had closings that took place at the title company. So that kind of makes sense as to why they had a disparity in labor.

But realize too, because it was such a manual process, they would send 2 different searchers to the courthouse to search the same property. And when those searches came back, if they weren't exactly the same, they sent a 3rd more experienced searcher to search it a 3rd time. And so, I mean, it was, it was— Out of control. Yeah, exactly. That was, that was how they did it back then.

And so you look at the modern title agency today, There are title agencies that don't even have title examiners because they get their title evidence directly from their underwriter or, or, you know, something like that. And so I think what has drastically changed even in just my time, you know, is that title agents have become more specialized, focusing on a certain aspect, whether they do refinance work or commercial work or purchase work. And they have also seen this increasing rise in the closing is the most important part. It takes more compliance, more employees. It takes more resources, more computer power, all of that stuff.

And like I said, there's title agents today that may only have 1 or 0 quote unquote title people. And it's a real shift in not just the last 100 years, but maybe even just the last 30 years of how things are done. How have you seen the title industry evolve over the last decade, especially in how agencies are run and how clients are served? Yeah, I think that the last 10 years has seen kind of the full adoption of technology. I mean, back when I started in the title business in the 1990s, sure, we had a computer system and it could produce a HUD settlement statement and it could produce a commitment and all that sort of stuff.

But I mean, we still went to the courthouse and got physical copies of deeds and we still, you know, handwrote out chain sheets and and all that kind of stuff. I think that the consolidation of title software vendors and the real move of title software vendors over the last 10 years to bring in all of the other parts of the process through APIs and integrations and things like that. I mean, you can be in your software today and you can request a search from your underwriter and it can be delivered back into your software where all you have to do is print it. It fills in the fields. It gives you a fully typed commitment.

It's all there done for you, typed into your system. That didn't exist 10 years ago, or if it did, it was on an extremely limited basis. And I think, I think the change that's happened in the last 10 years is we have fully adopted the amount of technology that's available for the title industry. And it's made us more efficient. I mean, that's how we were able to do the kind of volume that went through the system during COVID in 2000, 2001, and 2002.

is highly efficient, being able to do those kinds of things at a very rapid pace. Uh, what do you, new role at, uh, at AmTrust, what kind of evolutions are you seeing on the underwriter side of the business? You know, I kind of touched on it when I kind of said, you know, that the, you know, there, there are the legacy players in the, in the world and they're, they're an important part of our industry. They exist for a reason. You know, they're, they're stable.

They've been there for a long time. They support, uh, the real estate industry as a whole. But I do think that the smaller, more regional, more adaptable, newer underwriters are certainly the incubators of new ideas, things like that. The legacy underwriters are publicly traded. Several of them own banks.

So for example, because they own banks, they're choosing not to do any cannabis-related transactions. The only underwriters that really are, are the smaller, more regional, newer underwriters because they have evaluated it from a risk standpoint and decided, hey, that's something we are comfortable doing. And they don't have the legacy of being publicly traded or owning a bank and those kinds of things. And so again, not saying anything bad about the legacy players. They're an important part of our industry.

It's just that the newer things are coming out of the smaller underwriters. Small underwriters are more agile and more, it can shift a lot quicker than I think they can. And look, I'll tell you another little story and I won't call out this particular underwriter, but they're from a Big 4 underwriter. And in Missouri, I still have some agents that I work with there. They've switched over to AmTrust to work with me here.

And Missouri has a very, it has a very unusual tax process for nonpayment of real estate taxes and foreclosure. Some states like Florida, sell the lien. And then if you, if the lien doesn't get collected, you'd then have to sell it again to somebody that wants to foreclose the property. It's not the way it happens in Missouri. All 115 counties in Missouri have an auction on the 4th Monday of August every year.

And any properties that have been non-paid for 3 years get sold at the courthouse steps. And then the taxpayer who loses the property has 1 year to Redeem the property. And if they don't redeem the property in that 1-year time period, the collector issues a deed. It's called a collector's deed to the person that bought it at the tax sale. Most buyers think that they've got clear title to that property and, you know, they go to their title company, they're like, oh, you know, I want to, you know, I want to get a loan on this and remodel it, or I want to sell it or whatever.

And then they go through the difficult process of being told, well, you know, a title company won't Insure it, you know, so on and so forth. And so the current statute in Missouri has a, what I would call a hard rule for a time horizon to bring claims to reclaim the property. And that horizon is 3 years. So think about it this way. You don't pay your taxes for 3 years.

Your property is sold 8 months later in August. You have to wait another year for the redemption period, the buyer gets the deed, then you have 3 more years under this statute to make a claim. It's almost 8 years from when you stop paying your taxes until somebody can get clear title. The legacy players are still choosing not to insure those deals after that 8-year period. They're making them wait 10 years from the collector's deed.

Wow. And again, they have their own risk profile. They're deciding that it's not And again, these are low-dollar transactions. These are deals that only generate a couple hundred dollars of premium. I get it.

They're not, they're always complicated. They have more trouble, but here's what happens for a title agent. The title agent doesn't get to pick and choose who their realtor customers work with. So maybe they have a realtor that's sending them 50 deals a year, but that one-off deal that they send in that they can't do, hurts their relationship with that realtor. Absolutely.

And I'm like, and so my, my whole thing is, you know what, if doing that one deal, that's a tax title deal, helps that title agent keep that relationship with that realtor happy and good, then we've done our job. We've created an environment where the agent can prosper and continue to build their business and all those kinds of things. And again, for their own reasons, they just don't The big legacy companies just don't see the value in some of those kinds of innovations. So do you think the changes in customer expectations, like faster closings, more digital touchpoints, are helping or hurting the industry? Boy, you know, this is a tough question.

It really is, because I, uh, see these going in 2 different directions. I see, I see some customer expectations being that it should be faster. And I think, and I think that is causing a lot of risk for fraud and wire fraud and seller impersonation and all those kinds of things. And so I think that's hurting the business because it's added another layer of complexity where we've had to include systems to verify identity and all these other things that didn't exist several years ago. I digress.

I'll tell you a quick story. I had it in one of my Ramblings of a Title Man a couple years ago. Back in the 1930s, my grandfather had a customer that owned several rental properties. And every, you know, couple of months he'd sell one, buy another one. And it would always cash deals.

It was, you know, back in the '30s and early '40s, they weren't financed. And my father always thought that he was somehow like laundering money for the mob or something. And so the way he would do his properties is he would title them when he bought them, In some just made-up name, you know, John Smith or something. And whenever he wanted to sell one, he'd go find, you know, my father used language from the, from this time period, but he's like, you know, he'd go find a drunk or a bum or something and, and, uh, you know, palm him $20 or something and bring him into the title company. And, you know, he'd say, you know, are you John Smith?

And he's like, yes, I'm John Smith. I own the property at 123 Main Street. And They'd sign it. They wouldn't get a driver's license. They wouldn't do anything.

And he would just sign, the property would get sold, and that was it. So all of the added complexity from fraud, from, uh, the wire system, from all that stuff has made it more difficult for the title industry. That is absolutely for sure. The side I see on the other side is I think that because of our social media environment, and I think with, uh, millennials and especially Gen Z buyers coming into the marketplace, There is more of this desire to actually have an experience. They want the experience of going to the closing and signing the paperwork and having those keys slid across the table for their first closing and taking their pictures for Instagram and all that kind of stuff.

And so while I think that the digital world has moved us for a lot more fraud and a lot more risk, I think the good news is that we are trending back. I just don't see that there's gonna be a huge pickup in doing digital closings. Maybe that'll happen for refinances, but that first-time home buyer, even more so than 20 years ago, wants to come to the title company and wants to have that moment of the house is mine kind of thing. From your vantage point, what do title professionals need to evolve if they want to stay competitive in today's— You know, that's a really good question. And, uh, I will tell you that there are title professionals who are building their own brands.

Um, they have a social following. They are connected to their customers. They are using whatever platform they prefer to use, uh, TikTok, Instagram, uh, Facebook, whatever, so that when people see their stuff, they're immediately top of mind. And, and, you know, they're connecting with their customers, with their real estate agents, with their loan officers, those kinds of things. And I think that the social component of being connected to your customers is where the biggest change is.

Back when I was first learning this business in the 1990s, how did you meet realtors? Well, you went to the realtor after-hour party at the Board of Realtors, or you went to one of their open houses or something. You know, you went where the realtors are. Well, the realtors aren't there anymore. They don't go to those kinds of gatherings anymore.

You have to find them online. And I think that's been a A big shift for all of our people. You know, and I would tell people, you know, don't think of it as just a marketing department's job. If you're a closer, if you're the owner of a small title agency, you need to have those connections. You need to be building your brand.

You need to be posting information to your LinkedIn page or having a reel on Facebook or all those kinds of things. Those are going to be able to Put you more in the 21st century marketplace and connect you better to your customers. You've been vocal about change in the industry. Where do you see automation making the biggest positive impact in today's age? You know, I think automation is going to get to a point to where the title examination and creating the title commitment is extremely automated.

If I work another 10 years in this business, which I hope to, I think we will have a day, especially in those counties that have deep data where you really will, it really will be like Google where you'll press a button and boom, you'll get a title commitment completely drafted. Whether that's AI or whether that's an algorithmic-based product or something like that, you'll be able to search, examine title, and produce a commitment in the press of a single button. And I think that's where the biggest change is going to come in the next 10 years. And that just harkens me back to what I said earlier about the role of the closing side of the process being more valuable. If the title side of the process, the searching and exam is going to become more automated, that means you have to invest more time, more energy, more relationship building on the closing side.

And the great news is that we can do that because Buyers want that experience. They want to come to your office. They want to sit across the table from you. And I think that's where it's going to go over the next couple of years. And you could see a title company, you know, more like we see in the property and casualty world where the underwriter just produces the commitment and it's really more of like a closing operation where you do the closing and you file the documents and you pay off the mortgages and someday you'll just send the the recorded mortgage or the recorded documents back to the underwriter, and they'll just do the policy for you and pay you whatever commission you get for doing the closing.

I think there will be some models like that that will come out of this next, uh, this next period of change. Is there a technology or innovation that you think is overhyped or even potentially harmful to the title process? You know, I, I have seen lots of attempts to adapt AI systems to the title industry. And very similar to blockchain, I think everybody was talking about blockchain 5 or 6 years ago. Oh, this is going to revolutionize the title industry.

And there was never really that aha moment where you could say, yes, this is going to work. This is going to change things. This is going to change how we track files, how we track closings, how we, how we monument a title within the public records. Our laws are antiquated. You know, our recording laws in many cases go back to the 1800s.

And so I haven't seen today an AI application that is revolutionary. I've seen some ingesting AI products that take a purchase agreement and strip out all of the, like, you know, the buyer name, seller name, property address, closing date, and input it for you into a title software. But I'm like, that's not really what I can do, what you can do with AI in other settings. I mean, If I wanted to write a new Shakespeare novel, I could tell AI to do that and it would do one. It would do a 200-page novel, you know, and it's that kind of computing power.

We haven't figured out how to apply that to the title industry. So if you had, if you had a magic wand and if you had all the resources in the world, what would you focus on implementing AI? Oh boy. That's a really good question. I would probably say there's got to be a way To speed up the automation.

So there's, there's 3,000 counties in the United States, and about half of those counties have some type of automated title plant that another company, whether it's legacy player or an independent company, whoever it is, has built a digital title plant to where you can very quickly get title evidence out of that digital system. And I would say AI has got to have a solution That if you could just take the document, let's say you have a county that's not even online. If you could just take the copies of the documents, feed it into an AI model, it could index all those documents for you. And then boom, you'd have a title plan for a county that was never online and never digital previously. That's where I think somebody should be looking at AI systems because that's where it could really be helpful.

What advice would you give to a title agency owner Who feels overwhelmed by tech adoption, but knows they need to start somewhere? I would say talk to your underwriter. Uh, and, uh, I think that there are fantastic reps around the country. You know, I get to, I get to meet a lot of them at conferences and things like that. All of us that are at underwriters that work directly with agents, we want to help you.

We want to help you find the best tech. We want to help you find the best resources. We want to help you hire the best people. When you do good, we do good. And so we're there in your corner for you.

And so if you're overwhelmed, just say, hey, tell your rep next time you're in town, let's go to lunch. I want to ask you some questions about technology and some of the changes. They'd love to do that. And they're going to even buy lunch. So come on.

Your blog showcases a very human, honest side of the industry. Do you see thought leadership playing a bigger role for title pros moving forward? I really do, because I've heard the title industry call it the silver tsunami. You know, I've certainly got gray hairs in my beard coming in. I haven't quite got it in my hair yet, but I'm sure it's coming.

But, you know, there are fewer and fewer people that are lifers like us that are, that are, you know, doing this the whole time. And I also, uh, I also think that we kind of, uh, lost cohort from our industry. So, you know, if you think about a typical person's title career, you know, they start off in a processing or a searching role, and then they advance up to, you know, another role. And then, you know, maybe they get to a point to where they're managing an office or managing a team, and then they grow into a leadership role. Maybe they start their own company, all of those kinds of things.

And that's a normal kind of 30, 35-year cycle to go through all those processes. Well, the people that were the middle managers who had moved up from just, you know, just starting, but, you know, maybe have just gotten to a point where they're managing a team or they're something like that. All of those people left the industry in 2008 and 2009. I was almost one of them. I was having trouble finding a job in 2009 and was considering strongly leaving the industry for good.

As fortune would have it, I got a job offer the next week and decided not to go back to working at golf courses, which is what I was looking at. But so those people that should be starting their career 30 years ago and getting to a point where they're opening a title agency and getting to that point, those people moved on to something else. They got out of the industry and did something else. So I think The ability to have thought leadership, the ability to have people contributing and mentoring and bringing along the next generation. We have to even go to the even earlier group of cohorts that has only been in this industry the last 17 years since the recession, because those ones that were there before the recession, unless they're the old fogies like us that were way before the recession, they didn't come back to the industry when it picked back up.

If you were launching a new title agency today, what would you do differently compared to 10 or 20 years ago? Oh, well, I know this answer and like I mentioned earlier, you know, I know how to go bankrupt with a title agency. In the 1990s, you set up your title company across the street from the courthouse in the downtown and, you know, all the other title companies were in that same location and all this sort of stuff. And we had, you know, at one point my title agency in Missouri had, I think we were up to 17 offices in 17 counties. And that was just the model that you did business.

And I didn't realize at the time how much change was happening. Today, I would set up a title agency in a place where I could find really high-quality employees. Maybe that would be in a large metropolitan area. Maybe that wouldn't, I don't know. But I would locate someplace I can find high-quality employees and I would use technology to cover multiple counties or even multiple states.

I would not focus initially on having a whole bunch of branch offices. I would focus initially on capacity to do work in all those different locations. I'd talk to my underwriter. I'd say, hey, I can't cover these counties. Can you do the searches for me?

And things like that. I'd figure those kinds of things out because that's the real magic that's happened in the last 17 years is the old model of having a title company with, you know, 30 offices, you can do the same business with 4 offices that you could with 30. I always ask, once in a while I get asked, hey, how many offices do you have? I go, we don't care about offices, we care about transactions. Yeah.

We can cover so much ground with having central operations and regional operations. Yeah. No, I would, you know, if I had it to do over, I would've Probably closed 2/3 of those offices in 2008. I probably would've sent our title searchers to work remotely, to give 'em a laptop and tell 'em to go, you know, go, I want to use your free office in your house. I don't want to pay for it.

And, and, you know, that sounds terrible, I know, but I mean, that's what remote work does is you get to, you don't have to pay for the overhead for them to have a spot to work. And it's really a magical thing. And That's been a real change. And that's how I would really adapt a new title agency is I'd be like, all right, I want to be, I want to be native from the beginning, remote work as much as possible. I want to be centralized.

I want to use technology to its fullest extent. I want to lean on my underwriter relationships and get as much value as I can from my underwriter relationships. I think those would be the 3 or 4 things I would start with if I was, if I was opening a title agency. Uh, what's one lesson from, from your blog that seemed to really resonate with people? Maybe more than you expected.

Oh my gosh. So I have republished this article about 3 times now and just because of its popularity. So back in, all the way back in, I think it was like 2009 or 2010, I wrote an article called Title Tourism. And I just picked some, if you're a title guy and you're traveling around the country, What would you want to see? And it was inspired because I had been working in South Dakota and in Aberdeen, South Dakota is the repository of all of the Bureau of Indian Affairs records.

So all of the treaties, all of the land plots, all of the surveys, all of it is in Aberdeen, South Dakota. And so that was one of the places I mentioned. I'm like, you know, you want to know where You know, the biggest repository of title information is within the United States. It's in Aberdeen, South Dakota. And so I came up with some other places.

The oldest operating courthouse in the United States happens to be in New Jersey. It was built in the 1700s and they still hold court in that building. Which courthouse? What county in New Jersey? I'd have to go look it back up.

But, but yeah, it's— yeah, they still have a municipal court there in there, or at least they did in 2010 when I wrote the article. And then the second oldest one is in Virginia, but they had, they've since built a new courthouse and they use that building now for, I think it's like administrative offices or something. So it doesn't, it's not really a Fairfax County. It might be. It might be.

Yeah. Yeah. So I, so just, just things like that, you know, and I just, I just picked about 5 or 6 places. I'm like, oh, you know, this would be a really cool thing to go. You know, one other one that, that's in there is if you want to see how a courthouse operated in the 1700s and early 1800s, go to Williamsburg, Virginia.

And there is a replica courthouse there. And for those that don't know, Williamsburg, Virginia is a living museum. It has over 170 replica and refurbished buildings from the 1700s. And you get to see what a community looked like in You know, 1795 or whatever. Well, the courthouse where the land records were kept and where court trials happened and all that sort of stuff, that building is a fantastic educational thing.

Go talk to a docent, see how they used to do land transactions back then. It's really amazing. So that blog, that article, Title Tourism, I've published it a couple times. I get 30, 40 emails about it and, oh my gosh, this is wonderful. It's like, And it's like, why it's that one and not other ones, I have no idea.

But yeah, title tourism is the biggest seller of all my blogs. That's awesome. Well, thank you for the free plug of my home state of Virginia. It's a wonderful state. A lot of history.

It is indeed. What's one piece of advice you wish every new title agent would hear? When I started in this business, I had parents that were both in title business, and I'm an only child, so I got it from both parents. And They thought that I really ought to understand what it is I was selling. You're doing title insurance.

Do you know what that is? Believe it or not, they had me sit down and read cover to cover a title policy. And I don't think that— I think there are a lot of title people, even 10, 20 years into their career that haven't sat down and read the title policy cover to cover. Know what kind of coverages are in there. Know what kind of exceptions are in there.

And I've probably read it dozens of times since then because I needed to pull something out of it or explain something to somebody or do a seminar on it or whatever. But that was one of the early things my parents did for me that I'm like, you know what? That really kind of like set the table for everything else I did after that because I kind of knew the basics of what were in the title policy and I got to kind of move from there. As we're coming close to the end of this podcast, we always ask these personal, 2 personal questions. What of them, what's your favorite quote?

Or do you have a recent favorite quote? You know, I do an ethics presentation and I've done it for several land title associations and I always end that ethics presentation. And again, it's about ethics. So Harry S. Truman, 33rd president of the United States, the only president from my home state of Missouri.

He has a quote that goes something like, do your duty and history will do you justice. And so it's basically a nice way of saying, you know, you do the right thing, people won't always notice it, but it'll always make you a better person for it. And that's probably my personal best quote. That's something I like. That's awesome.

Definitely a new quote I haven't heard before, but it's really wonderful. What's your favorite book of all time, or maybe your favorite recent book you read or something you're reading right now? So I actually just completed, I've actually got it here. This is 1929. It's a book by Andrew Ross Sorkin.

NBC. And so, yeah, and he wrote Too Big to Fail, which was made into a movie called The Big Short with Steve Carell as the actor in it. And he kind of takes the same kind of approach to the Great Depression of 1929. And goes through who the major players were, the banks that went under, kind of how the whole process snowballed, how the bubble was created. I mean, he does a very good job of kind of reconstructing the historical of it.

So I know it looks like a big book when you see it on the bookshelf, but I took it to my vacation over Christmas and I read it in like 3 days. It was just awesome. And for me, it was kind of very personal too, because Remember, my grandfather lived through the Depression and had a job in the title business all through the Depression. And this, this is another little anecdote I'll give you. I, most of the stuff I have from my grandfather, I never worked with my grandfather.

So it comes to me via my father. He would tell me stories about this thing or that thing, but my grandfather always believed that the title business was as sure as being an undertaker. And I'm like, I'm like, what? I'm like, he's like, People always die and people always got to transfer real estate. That's always going to happen.

And the really, the only times that the industry has had difficulty and really had terrible times coming back from it has been when there's stagnation, when there's no real estate, no economic activity. There can be really bad economic activity like happened to my grandfather. I mean, he was doing mostly foreclosure work in In the 1930s, but it was paying the bills and keeping, you know, putting food on his table and all the other kind of stuff. And of course, my father, when he came into the title business in the 1950s, was the great baby boomer generation after World War II and all of the housing and all the, you know, the new invention of row houses and subdivisions and fast building and all that other kind of stuff. And so what really hurts us is like what happened in 2008, where No activity is happening.

Nobody's buying, nobody's selling. Nobody is in so bad a shape that they're getting foreclosed as much. But yeah, that's the real difference. So 1949 is my book. So Michael, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom.

We truly appreciate you here at the Title Agents Podcast. Thank you very much. And again, thank you for focusing a podcast on the title industry and how we continue to grow it and how we continue to make it important for everything that we do. So thank you again, Mo. I really appreciate it.

Big thanks to Michael Holden for joining us today and sharing not only his expertise, but also his genuine passion for the industry. If you haven't already, go check out Ramblings of a Title Man. It's a goldmine of insights, humor, and honesty about life in title. If you like the show and if you like this episode, please give us a review. And most importantly, please subscribe to the podcast.

We truly appreciate you. We'll see you next time. And that's a wrap on today's journey with Mo Choumil. I'm Mo Choumil from the Title Agents Podcast, reminding you that mastering the art of innovation is key in the title industry's fast-paced world. If you're finding it tough to keep up with the changes and challenges, remember, you're not alone.

Our calendar is open for you. Find the link in the show notes and let's connect. Make sure to hit subscribe to not miss out on strategies that elevate and insights that empower. We'll navigate the future of the industry. I look forward to our next meeting in the upcoming episode.

Keep pushing, keep innovating, and see you in the next episode.