Why Title Agencies That Refuse to Evolve Get Left Behind | Ep 112

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 another episode of the Title Agents Podcast. I am your host, Mo Choumil, CEO of Alltech National Title.

Today I have a good friend, George Duffield, from Integrity National Title Agency in South Jersey. Welcome, George. Thanks for having me, Mo. I really do appreciate it. We always start the show by having our guests tell their life story kind of in a couple minutes.

Give your background so our audience gets to know you. Got it. So born and raised in Philadelphia. I moved, you know, started having kids back in '96, moved to South Jersey. And it's weird, I'm going to be celebrating 29 years this year in the same house in South Jersey.

When I was younger, we didn't have a lot of money. We moved around a little bit. So to be in one house 29 years, wow, it's, it's different because I just had this conversation yesterday. I'm the old guy on the block, which is Strange, because I'm only 55 and I'm not that old. Yeah, I was going to say, you look fairly young.

A lot of moisturizer, a lot of moisturizer and good lighting. So moved to South Jersey. At the time, I owned a bunch of real estate and decided, hey, you know what, as a real estate investor, let me get my real estate license, not realizing that selling real estate for yourself as an investor and doing it for the consumer are 2 different mindsets. You know, I didn't make a lot of money the first couple months. I took a Dale Carnegie class, How to Jumpstart Your Sales, and Dale Carnegie teaches you the art of putting yourself in somebody else's shoes.

So then I quickly became one of the top agents here in South Jersey. I had 3 kids, so I had to utilize my time differently than most realtors. I didn't do open houses, I didn't do floor time, I didn't do Nights, weekends. I started work at 6:30 in the morning and I was done at 2:33 because I had kids' sports. So it evolved into a business as opposed to where some people in real estate do it recreationally.

So now, how did you get into the title industry? It's a great question. So I used to give all my business to a company called Integrity Title, and what happened was Their main sales guy was also a friend of mine. And he said, hey, I'm starting my own title company. Are you going to give us your title?

And I was probably, I don't know, responsible for 25, 30 transactions a month between what I gave the company. And I was also always touting their praise because Integrity always did a great job. And I said, absolutely, I would still give you my work. Yeah, you got it. Don't worry about it.

I guess it was 3 weeks later, I landed a big account with a bank and about 55, 60 properties. And the first 2 deals I got on the contract, I gave to him. And Mo, when I tell you, he wrecked those deals so bad, it was like it blew up in my face. I didn't have eyebrows. And the owner of the bank reached out and said, I don't know who this title company is, this new title company that you recommended me to, but they do a terrible job.

So I started slowly giving work back to Integrity Title. So I went from Integrity, gave it to my friend that started his own. He's a startup now. I'm going back to Integrity Title. And the owner reached out one day.

I was at my kids' cross-country meet and she said, hey, listen, you've always been a good customer. You don't ask for much. You're the kind of realtor that stays in your lane. I don't, you know, when I was a realtor, I didn't tell the title people how to do title. I never told mortgage people how to do mortgages.

I got my own things to deal with over here. You guys handle title, you handle the mortgage, and it's a great successful relationship. And nonchalantly I said to her, hey, don't worry, I'll come work for you. I'll run your sales and marketing department while I'm watching my kid run cross-country. Mo, when I tell you I knew nothing about title insurance, I didn't know anything.

I just know that they do title. I never read a title report. I never read a title commitment. I had my own thing. And the owner said, what would you do?

Or what would you do different than what he was doing? And then it took me back to Dale Carnegie, how to put yourself in somebody else's shoes. And I said, hey, well, he's a title guy. He doesn't understand the true footsteps that the realtors are walking in. And I do, and I know what the pain points are.

I know what I could use help with. I know how to give that kind of help. And she said, let's have a meeting. And next thing you know, She was offering me a job. I wasn't looking for a job.

I was making really good money as a realtor. I, you know, I haven't worked for somebody since I was 20 years old. I've always been self-employed, you know, and I wound up meeting with her, her partner, which is now my business partner, Fran Turchi. And a couple things, we worked out a couple things and I wound up leaving a very successful real estate career to go in the title insurance space to run a sales and marketing department, not knowing a thing about title. But what I do know is how to market.

And, you know, if you can't market the product, nobody's going to buy it. I say it all the time, unseen, untold is unsold. If people don't see you, they're never going to buy it. And that's what got me into the title space. So what's changed the most about the title business since you got started?

Well, when I first got in the title business, now mind you, this is 2011. When I first got there, I asked the staff at the time, can I see your database? And they basically handed me like 15 different Excel spreadsheets. I didn't even know how to work Excel, but they didn't even have it on a computer. They handed it to me.

So I'm thinking to myself, all right, This is going to be an uphill battle. And I said, you know, once I started digging in, I realized that title insurance has been the same throughout the years. And they don't want the people that are title purists. They don't want change. They like doing things a certain way because that's all they know.

And being self-employed, you're always elevating and evolving and pivoting Throughout your business. I mean, it's just the way it is. If you want to stay relevant, you got to pivot. And for an example, to give you some insight of when I knew this was— this could be something special, I had a client reach out and said, I sent you a title order. Did you get it?

I don't know. I didn't see it. So I reached out to our orders department. I said, did you get a title order from XYZ? Yeah.

I said, well, did you notify him? No, he knows he sent it. I said, well, wait a second. How would he know he said it? I mean, I know he knows he said it, but he doesn't know unless you tell him you received it.

Acknowledge it. And they had no idea about acknowledging it. They just, you know, it's the assumption. He knows we got it. We're just working on it.

But you never created anything, no dialogue, no communication to tell somebody this is what's going on. So I knew right there, that I had to start looking at the title industry differently to be able to provide the right service for the customer, to bring them along throughout the transaction. So that was when I knew, right there I knew. You hear that saying, right there I knew? That's exactly when I knew it.

What's one lesson about building and running a title company that you had to learn through experience? Patience. Patience. Finding the right staff, taking time to hire the right staff. You know, there's a lot of people in this industry, especially in operations, that are fantastic people.

They know title through and through, but there's a disconnect with communication with the front half. No different than a restaurant with the waiter and the chef, right? If you want to have a great product, everybody's got to be able to communicate. And the communication between operations and sales has been a challenge throughout the years, depending on personality. But we, me and my partner, feel the more we communicate back and forth, but more importantly, communicate and bring the staff into the conversation, not just 2 owners communicating, it has been game-changing for us personally, which is nice.

Yeah. The whole kind of conflict between sales and operations, that kind of In any industry, pretty much. Yes. And it's not, it's not just title specific. Well, you know, the, I, I've owned other, other companies and it was, it was different.

So I didn't have firsthand knowledge or firsthand experience in watching it, you know, from afar. And one of the things when we first got into the business, I would see salespeople go to operations people, hey, what's going on with this? I need this. I need, and they're now telling somebody else how to do their job. So me and my partner, in the very early stages, we said, listen, we want them together, but we want them to have communication that is not directive.

It's more of like informative. So we don't let our sales team have those kind of conversations. Our sales team doesn't have access to the backend software, meaning they don't know the intricacies of what's going on. We feel you don't want all chiefs and no Indians. So the sales team will go to a processor if they need something, and the processor will do what they have to do.

I don't want multiple people telling different stories, and that has been very helpful. I know with some title companies being in the business since 2011, operations absolutely despises salespeople because they know they're getting paid commission. And therefore they only have one interest, their best interest at heart, not the company's. And operations, they're purists. They want things a certain way.

And we just said, you know what, we're going to change the narrative. When you go to them, it's more on a helping hand, not like I'm worried about something dying. You stay out of the deal. You always refer back to the processor or the closer, whoever, you know, needs that particular question. And you're not to answer it.

I know a lot of companies say they, and I talk to a lot of salespeople from other title companies, they want, they want their hands in it. And as an owner, I don't want their hands in it. I look at it this way. The less they know, the better. Because in this business, you could say something and they could go sideways 20 different ways because it's not a one-on-one communication.

It's one with a couple realtors, a couple brokers, a couple attorneys, might have an accountant, might have a couple financial advisors involved. And if you say one thing that you really don't know, you just created a bomb and it's going to blow up in your face. So what makes the New Jersey title market unique? The way it's done. So, you know, I had somebody, and I won't say any names because I know you have a lot of people watch your podcast, but it's a high executive from one of the larger underwriters.

He said the wild, wild west is on the east. So you just don't need to do things. And, uh, You know, because in North Jersey you deal with nothing but attorneys, right? And in South Jersey, you have a lot more interaction with the client. Down in South Jersey, if somebody's buying a $4 or $5 million commercial building, I'll have conversations with the buyer.

Multiple reasons. One, you want to establish a relationship with the buyer. You don't want them, you know, if they're buying a couple million dollar property, this isn't their first rodeo. They know what they're doing. But you also want to create a relationship with them.

In North Jersey, they just want to huddle everybody. They want— they don't want you to have communication with anybody. They don't want— they want to show their value. And listen, there's a lot of attorneys out there that are really good, but there's a lot of them that are not team players and they don't play well in the sandbox and it creates contention throughout the process. So that's the difference that I see in Pennsylvania.

Florida's just a different market. Florida, Florida's just different. In Pennsylvania, everybody wants to work for the buyer to get the deal done. Nobody wants to stand on a rock with a cape blowing in the wind saying, I'm Superman. Nobody wants that.

We all want to work together. You know, you'll see brokers help out the attorney saying, hey, I think you might have missed something. Check this. You'll see the attorney saying, hey, just so you know, this is going to be a problem and we don't want 11th-hour problems. So how about we all work together?

Nobody just, they stay in their lane, but they assist if they need to. They don't say it's not. In Pennsylvania, I feel that they don't throw their hands up saying, it's not my job. And I see that sometimes in Jersey. From an owner's perspective, what risks or industry changes do you think title agencies are not paying attention enough to right now?

Well, I know there's a lot of talk on cyber and wire fraud. I, you know, sometimes when something new or a buzzword hits the market, it's talked about and people do a little bit and then they forget, they get complacent, and that's when they get tapped. I feel that that really should be the main driver and there should be a lot more emphasis put in on that. We talked briefly earlier a little bit about AI in a pre-conversation. I think there should be a little bit more emphasis on that, but not too much.

You know, the average person thinks, oh, AI is replacing jobs. AI is not replacing jobs. It's streamlining jobs. It's making things more efficient. It's keeping an eye on people's inadequacies, and it's elevating a person to be better.

Absolutely. So, so let's start talking about technology and AI. Where has technology genuinely made the title processor or paralegal, escrow officer better? And where do you think we still have a long ways to go? So I'll start with the long way to go.

The long way to go is the mindset in the industry. You have a lot of people that are, they have been in the business for 30+ years and they don't want change. And that starts from the top. If you bring management in or ownership or some of these underwriters that are tech forward, you're going to see big changes. You know, sometimes you think about it.

One president made a comment about doing away with title. Do you know how much money a lot of agencies lost with the— I don't know if you remember, one of the former presidents made a comment during the State of the Union. I'm trying not to say any names and be— It's Biden. Yeah. Yeah, it was Biden.

For no reason at all, he blurted that out. Uncle Biden. And there was a lot of shift to saying, well, people don't really need title insurance. That came from the top and that created such a loss for agencies, for underwriters. It created opportunity for a lot of mortgage companies because with the attorney opinion letter, they said, well, if— and it created money, more money for attorneys.

If you use our in-house counsel and they review title and there's no issue, we're going to give you a discount, but it's going to cost you $1,500. You know, that was one piece. For top-down, the message has to change. The message has to change. I see in the sales time on the sales side, better communication with a lot of CRMs.

We've had HubSpot or We've had Salesforce for quite some time, and that has made things incredibly efficient on the sales side. Many years ago when we first got into creating our software that we have now, which is ResWare, one of the things that I originally thought about was when the first deal came in and the processor said that customer knows that they sent the order. We Got in with some people early on, the guys at Close Simple, and we started to understand the theory about a pizza tracker for title insurance. We overlapped that where we have milestones to communicate with people. You know, Mo, how many times have you sat at a settlement table?

I don't do settlements. Let me just make that disclaimer. But I've been at settlement tables where somebody's looking at the CD or the HUD and they say, what is this massive charge for title insurance? And they don't even know what title is. They don't, they'd never had communication with the title.

They've had communication with the title insurance company, but they really didn't know what they were buying. And then all of a sudden they see this ridiculous charge for title insurance and they say, well, I never talked to anybody at this company. And I, you know, because a lot of communication sometimes goes back and forth with the attorneys and the bankers and the brokers, you get a sense of like, well, how do we communicate better? That's an industry problem, right? Keep the consumer out of the, The business, which doesn't make any sense to me.

So we started putting a lot of automation. When this is done, the customer gets notified. When this is done, the attorneys get notified. And keeping everybody on the same page creates better communication. That's something that's been at the forefront of what we're trying to do.

We don't want anybody to assume anything. We just want you to know because we've told you. And we get a lot of compliments on the communication piece. Are you still on Salesforce? So we are on Salesforce.

I got Salesforce in 2012. Sales— it's amazing how many title companies I talk to that their salespeople, they don't have any CRM. And when I ask them how are they tracking, some, some, some of the software out there, they have some tracking stuff that they'll send to To salespeople, but it's not, it's not a true CRM. So for me, I like to track exactly where my work's coming from, how, what work's coming from what counties, what work is coming from what zip codes, what industry am I getting more business from than others? When I first started in the business, 11, I didn't know the difference between resi, commercial, refi, purchase.

I didn't know anything. And we had one client that probably gave us 80% of our business, and it was a bank. Once again, I had no idea. And that work from the bank was mostly refinance work. And when I started to really understand it in a few months, I said, wait a second, we're probably one bad day from losing a customer.

And that's, it was all concentration. So I realized right away we need to get our purchase business up. Sure enough, we got up to about 60, 65% purchase business and the customer went away. You know, I say a lot of times we write customers, they only stay with us for X amount of time. If they don't like the color of your hat, they're going to somebody else.

If you make an off post on social media, they're going somewhere else. If your processor didn't call them back, Yeah. In 4 seconds, they're going somewhere else. So when we have 'em, we try to service them the best we can. But getting back to Salesforce, we felt that we need to track things better, right?

I had one client reach out to me. He was an attorney. He said, hey, I got 400 foreclosures for you. Ah, it sounds fantastic. When I went to my partner, she's like, okay, this is one of those educational moments.

400 foreclosures equals X amount of money in expense based on time. This is what we're going to make, and this is the fall-off rate. I immediately said, you know what? We have to understand that. At the time, there was a lot of short sales.

How much of our business is short sale, purchase, refi, commercial? Where do we get our business from? I like to track, are we getting X amount from bankers? Are we getting X amount from attorneys? Is it the consumer?

Last year we got 7% of our business consumer-directed. No realtor, no attorney, no banker referral. The consumer picked up the phone, they found us online, they see our stuff on social media, they found us on LinkedIn, and they said, hey, I want to have a conversation with you. You know, the state dictates the price. So if the state is dictating the price and every single title company is the same, Then what are you selling?

We're selling service. So you're using Salesforce mainly for intelligence, not as, uh, not much of CRM, I guess. We're using it for intelligence and yeah, tracking too. Salespeople wanna see, you know, we, we do have competitions amongst the salespeople who could do this and who can do that. But yeah, I mean, we need, we need to know exactly what our client, who our clientele is and how can we service them.

You can't service a banker the same way you would service an attorney, right? For us, we want to make sure that everybody's getting serviced properly. We do a lot of cross-pollinating. You know, I take attorneys and I'll match them up with this accountant. I'll take this attorney and match them up with this banker.

We're in a process of shifting gears, moving over the reservoir, Or I'm sorry, moving over to HubSpot. And that's one of the things that we're implementing is generations. I want to see, Mo, who, what banker I introduced to and who I introduced that person to and who I introduced that person to. And I want to be able to track if I make 10 introductions for one attorney and I haven't received any type of business or referral or an introduction on the way back, I'm going to pump my brakes. Yeah.

You know, it's a referral-driven business. We're not in an industry where we can advertise on TV. I mean, we could, but we'd be wasting our money and people are just going to start calling us to price shop. We're not CURE Auto or GEICO or State Farm or Allstate. We're driven by referrals.

We get our business from attorneys, bankers, lenders, realtors, you know, so there's only 8 Categories that actually send us work. We can't cast a big net to, you know, to the masses and be able and try to gather business. It's just, that's not the industry. It's strictly referral industry. What's your perspective on AI in the title industry?

I love it. I think it's great. My partner's got 40 years in the business, and I'll never forget we had a conversation and we were saying, you know, AI is going to replace examining. It's not that it's going to replace it, it's going to enhance it. And she was like, absolutely not.

It's never going to touch it. You know, we travel to a lot of title conferences across the country. I probably do 5 or 6 of them a year. And, you know, there's some really good companies out there that are on the cusp of really nailing it, but they're not there yet. And I feel they're not there yet is because they're title people.

They're too far in what they're trying as opposed to looking at it from 10,000 square foot. And it'll probably make sense to them. We had a couple conversations with some other companies with examining and guess what? AI is going to replace examining, but it's going to replace it differently. Everybody thinks it's either, it's a left or a right.

It's white or black. No, it's gray. It's going to do something. And enhance is probably the most significant word you could say for AI in our business. Biggest problem I see a lot of times is human error.

You know, when an examiner's missed something or when somebody didn't pick up the phone or somebody didn't get this payoff, that's all human error. Well, imagine if you had something in like a checklist and it went through it and it says, hey, these 7 items still have to be done. Or none of this gets through. That's something that I think is going to be huge in our industry. So we're going to take an outdated industry and try to bring it up to speed as soon as, you know, I say as soon as possible, but if the agent or the owner of the title company has the foresight to see it, that company will survive.

It's amazing, like with AI, that the title examination, it's definitely going to happen, like just to I think it's already there, but— It's happening. It's getting better and better. Yep. But the quality control on a file, that's massive. Like, we've kind of rolled out Claude Teams like 3, 4, 5 months ago, gradually.

Yep. But a couple months ago, we did a survey with the team, like who's using it, who's not using it. And then some of our processors or paralegals caught, I mean, missing deeds and like in a chain of title, missed 2, 3, 4 things that would've been literally massive kind of potential claims in the future. Then when I saw those kind of those results, I'm like, hey, this is not even optional. Everybody has to use it.

When we come in, that must have an impact kind of reducing risk. That's a massive thing. It's enhancing their work. It's not replacing them. It's more— It's like having an assistant.

It's a second set of eyes. And this industry, they don't want that because they're purists, but they don't understand that this is— And George, an assistant at a PhD level. That's how to mix it. In real time. Yeah.

In real time. It'll make their quality of life much better. If the narrative changes from replacement to enhance, everybody's going to win. Everybody's going to win. And that's— it's work, right?

It's work. It's a message from ownerships have to deal with it. And if they can convince Their management team, and it'll get trickled down. I had a conversation with a person yesterday. Somebody reached out looking for a job, and I asked him what company he's with, and he mentioned it.

I remember hearing the name. It's a smaller agency out in Pennsylvania, and I said, out of curiosity, what software are you on? And he said, T E T E Title Express. Oh, T S S T S T Title Express. And I said.

Oh my God. I, we had that many, many years ago, day one that I was there and we moved to another title company. And I said, that's like having, I don't know, this is dating my age, but it's like having DOS. Like, this isn't a floppy drive. What do you mean?

Yeah. But it's, this is the scenario in the title agency, uh, title business too. Mm-hmm. You have a lot of owners that are well past their time. in the business, they don't contribute anything more.

70. This, this owner, the one owner was 72 years old. He feels he's got another run in him, so he's not spending any money on technology. He's, he's not helping the industry. He's actually hurting it because when things start to happen, oh, this— I used this title company years ago.

They were tight. All title companies are this, all title companies are that. And that's not the reality. I know, you know, the common statement I hear all the time, oh, you're with a title company? Oh, you make a fortune.

What? Not even close. I hear that all the time. We print money, but yeah, because we cut checks. I had an attorney tell me, yeah, you guys are making money hand over fist.

You're charging $900 an hour. I could be doing a deal and it could take me 6 months. I'm making $12 an hour. What are you talking about? Or get canceled.

Or get canceled on. That's a suspense. And nobody's going to pay you a dime on top of it. So yeah, yeah, the mindset has to change in the industry. And that goes from the underwriters to the agencies and agencies to the staff, right?

There's not a lot of people coming up through the ranks. We've been hiring a lot of people from outside the industry. We feel we can train them better. We feel we, we can train them with a non-biased mindset and they're jumping into technology because they don't know any better. You take somebody that's been working somebody somewhere 20 years, you're going to pay them at the highest end of the food chain and they're not going to want to change because this is the way they've done it.

This is the way they've done it. So technology, what I think AI is really going to enhance and really start to slingshot the title community Past where it was normally going. I think it's going to move a little quicker than than how it's been. And there's a lot of great people in the industry, Mo, that are embracing technology a lot. Whether it's the guys over at Close Simple or some of these some of these other tech companies, they're thinking, they're working it, they're thinking it, and they're saying, "How can we take this product and make it ten times better?" And we're very fortunate.

that we're kind of living in this time and we're benefactors from this. Absolutely. All the while we're printing money, Mo. We're printing it for other people. Yeah.

Technology's not cheap. Let me just put that disclaimer out there. You're well aware of it. Absolutely. We've, as we're coming to the end of the show, it's been a great conversation.

I always ask our guests a couple questions. One of them is, do you have a favorite quote? Yeah, 2 of them. Persistence overcomes resistance. I've always felt that.

And unseen, untold is unsold. If people don't see you, they will never buy you. I love that. Please revert back to that because when you get in the trenches of what we do all the time, if you're not working on your brand, your brand's not being sold. Absolutely.

Do you have any last words for our audience? And it's been a great conversation and very insightful. I can't thank you enough for giving me the opportunity to speak my story on your platform, and I'm very grateful for it. So thank you, Mo. Awesome.

Well, George, thank you so much. And to our audience, if you enjoyed this conversation, please give us a review, ideally a 5-star. Until next time, have a wonderful day. Thank you again. Enjoy your day.

In a world where change is the only constant, Mo Choumil stands at the front, 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.