AI & Document Automation in Title Insurance | Ep 3

Being able to do a really efficient job on a document, which is just being able to open it, separate it, stack it, look for errors and omissions, extract content from it, put the content in the right place, all those document pieces becomes a lot more powerful with a generative sort of form of AI that everybody's got to work with now. In a world where change is the only constant, Mo Shamil 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 Title Agents Podcast.

I have a privilege to have Marty Frame from MyHome as a guest today. Here's a little background on Marty before I start the show. Marty is the president of MyHome, a Wilson Financial Group company, in which capacity he's responsible for the company's product strategy and business operations. Prior to joining MyHome, he has enjoyed a long career as a senior technology leader in the real estate and mortgage services industry at Realtors Property Resource, a subsidiary of NAR, Cyber Homes, a subsidiary of FNF or Fidelity, and Lender Processing Services and Realtor.com, a subsidiary of Move, Inc. Welcome, Marty.

Thanks, Mo. Fun to be here. Before we get started with some questions, I would love to get your background, your history, how you got started. I know you're local to the D.C. area.

I understand you grew up in Baltimore. I grew up in Baltimore and still an O's fan. Actually, great to see them on the rise again. But I live in Los Angeles. I've been here for about 30 years, so I guess you could call me fully assimilated out here, too.

I've been in the technology space for almost that long. Actually, in the real estate technology space for almost that long and the technology space for longer. I got my start on the real estate side. Like a lot of people, probably somewhat, I would say, accidentally, but unintentionally, 30 years ago, building software to help real estate brokerages and kind of got found on the Internet in the early days of the Internet in the late 90s by one of the founders of Realtor.com. It was a brand new company.

It was just a few employees, and they're like, hey, we're going to do something cool over here. So I joined them, and it was very cool. It was quite a ride. I was there for about 10 years. All kinds of things happening in that moment in time, putting listings online for the first place and building a workflow, especially real estate agents, but really getting into a lot of the technologies that power real estate.

So a lot of smart people, a lot of activity, really fun to be there. And after about 10 years of that, I sort of shifted gears, went over to Fidelity, and they had a vision of leveraging some of that consumer experience to build out something there, which we did. And I think a lot of people started technology companies. This was around 2006 and 2007. It was fun in 2006 and 2007, and it wasn't fun in 2008 and 2009.

And so we got to a point where we sold it. And actually, we'd built up something that I thought was pretty valuable and sold it into a partnership with the National Association of Realtors, where it lives on to this day as a private tool called Realtors Property Resource, or RPR, which is a wonderful asset and a unique asset that the Realtors have, and one with a lot of, you know, provides a lot of strategic advantage to them. So I was there for another about 10 years. And then I got the call from Pat Stone and Steve Ozonian here at WFG, who I'd known and worked with and respected and regarded both as mentors for a very long time. I can say definitively that, you know, all the good things in my career are attributable to one or the both of them.

So it's hard to resist when they called me up and here I am working for WFG and my own for the last six years. That's awesome. So tell me a little bit about my home and what does my home aim to achieve and the real estate landscape? Yeah. So part of, you know, Pat's original vision for WFG when he founded it was that there would be a technology subsidiary, I don't want to say at the heart of it, but as an important part of the business plan, but certainly technology would be at the heart of the company.

And the goal of my home is to leverage the company's investment in technology for the benefit, not just of our customers and direct markets and consumers and the clients that we serve, but also to be able to turn those technologies sort of inside out, if you will, and offer them to agents and brokerages and title agents, lenders, you know, all the constituents we serve, there's going to be some utility that people are going to have from different aspects of the technology that we've developed for ourselves. So we always build things in a way where we can turn them inside out and make them, you know, sort of available to our customers and even people who are not our clients, build out the technology ecosystem that powers our industry. You've been at the forefront of transforming real estate process to be more connected, efficient, and secure. What are some key innovations my home has introduced to the market? Like some real life examples you can share with me.

My home was, you know, even before I got here, WFG was doing wonderful things with my home, beginning with pioneering in the consumer and realtor and lender collaboration space. There are definitely many products these days that bring the parties together into a portal or some sort of experience or provide notifications. There are all kinds of variants like that. But WFG was really, I think, the first to create and very, you know, for a long time, you know, the only creative product that put realtors and lenders and consumers together in a transaction and created a space for them to collaborate. And we've really focused on extending that over the years.

So what was in the, I'd call it the trid days, notifications portal, right? You can sort of stay on top as a consumer, as a realtor and a lender on what was happening has become a space where new things, right? And not just know things where you can review and sign documents, where you can initiate and make payments, where you can transition into an online closing or an e-close if you want to. And where you can, after you've consummated the transaction, you can manage your home, stay on top of what's happening in the neighborhood, stay on top of what your agents, you know, the agent that you do business with to buy that home, what they're doing and what's happening with rates. So all kinds of things that build out a lifecycle of value for our clients and the consumers they serve with a couple of goals.

One is to provide a great customer experience for everybody. And two is to, you know, sort of do a good job for the realtors and the lenders who refer business to us to stay involved with consumers and help position them right out in front as people go through the next 7, 8, 9, 10, 20 years of owning their homes. It's a good way to stay in front of the customer and the agent way past the closing. One mistake in the majority, if not all, all of us independent agents. And trying to build a cycle out of it.

Yeah. And then, but there's also a process efficiency component of that too, which is if we can save the consumer some anxiety from not knowing what's going on, that's really valuable. If we can save some phone calls, that's great for everybody's efficiency. We can save some time. And if we close faster because we're doing things online, that's good for everybody too.

The focus on digital real estate often ends at closing. With technologies like smart docs and e-signing, what steps is my home taking to extend this digital integration beyond closing? I think we talked about that if you want to expand on it. I love the question because there's a lot of focus on, I'll call it the digital mortgage. And that's even a term of art that you're used a lot.

That's critical because as an industry, we've been engaged in trying to find those automations and those efficiencies for a long time. And we all know how challenging that's been. And there are some structural reasons for that. And it's tough, right? It's critical.

And I guess our vision is, doesn't end there, right? So we can and do invest significantly in all those kinds of activities, but we really view the real estate process as a cycle, right? So consumers, transacting homes doesn't obviously end there. If they can stay engaged, stay informed, and we can help position the realtors and the lenders that they worked with back in front of them, we're going to save everybody a lot of grief when the need arises again, whenever that is, right? It's not up to us to determine that, but it's up to us to help our customers do a great job staying in front of their clients.

Because it's tough, as we all know, most people do report, if you look at satisfaction surveys, most people do report having a great experience with a real estate agent and a great experience with their lender. And most people also will tell you, and they do tell the folks who do these surveys, that they don't remember who they are next time it comes time to list or to buy, right? So every little bit we can do helps to create those cycles. Life gets in the way. It's very hard to remember somebody- Absolutely.

Like six, seven, eight years ago. So to stay in front of it makes it a lot easier when the time comes in. I've talked to a lot of friends that own title companies that are friendly competitors, what I call them. And one of the biggest struggle that I see is title professionals or title agency owners have a hard time delegating or automating a lot of processes. And what advice and what's kind of like maybe some baby steps you can give to our title agents partners?

This is one of the biggest challenges in the whole industry, definitely among... And it's really true across the board because we're in an entrepreneurial industry and in predominantly, not obviously, 50-50 small business environment, right? We've got a lot of large businesses and we have a lot of small businesses in that entrepreneurial persona. As a technologist, that's the most fun part of the challenge, right? Is trying to help improve the process and efficiency and experience for title agents kind of working at that scale, real estate companies working at that scale, that single office, couple office type scale.

And there are a lot of opportunities. So first and foremost, as an underwriter, we really do focus on providing a lot of those automations as seamlessly through the process as we can. And we're advantaged in the title space insofar as there's a vendor community that's relatively small, relatively contained, and I don't want to say easy to work with, but the pathways to working with the vendors are pretty well known. It's not... scale, real estate companies, you know, working at that scale, that single office, couple office type scale.

And there are a lot of opportunities. So first and foremost, as an underwriter, we really do focus on providing a lot of those automations as seamlessly through the process as we can. And we're advantaged in the title space insofar as there's a vendor community that's relatively small, relatively contained, and I don't want to say easy to work with, but the pathways to working with the vendors are pretty well known. It's not that, you know, they're hard to work with, but it's just, there's a lot going on and they have roadmaps of their own. But unlike the real estate, sort of the realtor in a brokerage side that I came up in where there's a huge diffusion of technology in the title world, you're talking about a few vendors.

So there's a lot that we can push through our integrations with the soft pros and the quality and the res wares and the round quests and all those kinds of things that really do benefit agents working at every level of scale, right? In terms of how we exchange information, in terms of how quickly we, or how much automation we can introduce into the process, how much automation we can introduce into search, pushing data back. There are a lot of opportunities there. Yeah. It always baffles me, like somebody, let's say worth $200, $500 hourly rates and tell agency owner, and you can see them treating data, like open a file.

I'm like, why don't you kind of outsource that or have someone else do it. Absolutely. $15, $20 an hour or 30, whatever that rate is, I can let you focus. There's a great case study there too, because for a long time, there have been these sort of instant title, instant clear to close products, right? And they haven't really, for many years, they didn't get a lot of traction.

There are interesting concepts and valuable in certain ways, just in terms of giving you a curative grade or something like that and letting you manage your workflow accordingly. But that was really a lot on the lender and the underwriting side, right? What started happening a couple of years ago was that people, meaning vendors, but also title agents in particular started driving the vendors of these products, including us to say what we want on top of a curative grade or an instant clear to close decision. If you can render one is we want data, right? And our problem is how do we save ourselves from all the stuff you just mentioned, all the typing, all the exam stuff.

If you can push data into our system in conjunction with one of those instant products in a way, which, you know, saves us time with a vendor or saves us our own typing time, just, you know, use the integration that you're doing with us to land data in the right place in our system, you'd save, it's always quantifiable, half an hour here, an hour there, two hours there, you know, a little bit of back and forth with an offshore vendor somewhere else, right? And those are really measurable impacts that you can create to your cost structure. We had Pat Stone as a guest a couple of weeks ago, and he mentioned like every single real estate transaction, the data is entered about 80 times. It's insanity. Well, you know, I, one of my, one of the, like the things that's really true about our industry, and this is true for lenders.

This is true for realtors. It's true in title is that there's a sort of a groundhog day mentality to all of that, which is, you know, very little in our industry is what I would call parcel centric. We treat every transaction, every borrower, every transaction on a property as though it's the first time, right? So we certainly go back through the history of things and try to use as much of that data in the form of starters and so forth as much as we can. But across the board, the data is being rekeyed all through the food chain and don't exclude, you know, once you get to that loan being securitized and diligence being done on the loan and investors coming in and doing their, you know, having their look at it, that data is being rekeyed many, many, many, many times.

And no one has built, to my mind, technology that really leverages the fact that those are pathways that have all been trodden before, right? And reusing data that's already been entered into a data vault. Yeah. This is my personal opinion. I don't think the issue is technology.

Technology has been there forever. Yeah. I think the issue is everybody wants control. Yeah. Every lender or whatever, they want that control.

It'd be like the battle, like in real estate, in the platforms from Zillow to my home to, I'm sorry, homes.com and everybody wants control. It's like the holy grail to control the platform. That's the issue. There's a lot of fighting. Nobody wants to kind of collaborate.

Everybody's like, I just want to do it my way, or hopefully I can dominate the markets and it's done my way. Exactly. And you see a lot of people doing the same things in different places as a result. And they all think they're unique, by the way. And lots of phone calls with people who are like, I do X, Y, or Z, and I'm the only one who does it.

And just from where I sit, I talked to a lot of people who are doing those things. It's funny, like how the lenders complain, whine about how the transactions are expensive. And the funny part with all technologies and efficiency, I think it used to take 45 days to close. I don't know how many, 20, 30 years ago, it still takes 45 days to close. Pretty much.

I think the cost per loan, I think it's eight, nine, $10,000 somewhere around there, and it's still the same cost. That makes no sense. Yeah. And there are many reasons that are hard to crack. So there's that control piece, and I absolutely agree, right?

If it's not done our way, then it's not done the right way kind of thing. I also think that you could look at the cost of origination, and actually the whole cost structure of a lot of the industry, particularly through the last two economic cycles where we had a boom a couple of years ago in real estate, and now we're in our lean years. But our cost structures, I think if you look across the industry, our cost structures haven't changed that much, right? I mean, they've changed a lot, right? A lot.

There's been a huge sort of deceleration in the number of people that we have processing different functions of our industry. But to inflation and due to inertia, I think if you were to make a sort of same store comparison, the current cycle to call it 2008 or 2009, you'd find higher cost structures just because there are more people and more technology and more functions, more people doing a little bit less, a little bit less efficiency, even as technology is trying to overcome those sort of people inefficiencies. Stick, I guess, with efficiency and technology. My passion is AI, something I'm very excited about, and just to look at the tools and look at the infinite possibilities what it can do with AI. And I know you guys are working on some AI tools that you're using.

Can you just share with our audience and what you're working on, what you're doing with AI? Yeah. I was wanting to learn from different people what are the best ways to leverage AI. Yeah, for us, our view of it is the AI is not really a singular thing or technology. AI has its roots in all kinds of different automations.

I mean, there are aspects of AI that you could call, you know, we used to call them RPA, Remote Processed Audio, or bots. The things we do in the AI world now are definitely descended from some of those technologies. And there's some net new, you know, really exciting new technologies like the generative AI. And we do work in all of them. So, you know, I kind of classify four different areas where we're active for you, just as examples of what I think the power of these different variants of AI can be.

So the first is probably going to be the most straightforward, which is, you know, document AI. And this descends very directly from OCR and, you know, RPA on documents. But being able to do a really efficient job on a document, which is just being able to open it, separate it, stack it, look for errors and omissions, extract content from it, put the content in the right place, all those document pieces becomes a lot more powerful with the generative sort of form of AI that everybody's got to work with now. The step in terms of evolution from the bot era is flexibility, because RPA type area, you've got very rigid implementations that the pattern doesn't match, then you got to kick it to a queue and somebody's got to review the document and figure out why the bot didn't work, right? The generative is actually, you know, the generative form of this is actually a lot more sort of accommodating, right?

Anytime you can make an integration more accommodating, it's going to be more durable, it's going to move faster for you. So that's one area. The second area where we're real active is in process automation. We spend a lot of time just looking over the shoulder of our closers, of our title examiners, of really everybody in our business, and trying to figure out where the moments are where we can automate something that they're doing, right, that doesn't need them to be doing something repetitive, or, you know, something like that, and just sort of step in and automate that piece. And then there's sort of another level of that, which is not only looking for the obvious things, but then leveraging a data aggregation mentality, for example, in title exam to take a different approach to how data is being pulled from plant, how it's being combined in a search, how it's being deployed in a search package, how that search package is being delivered, right?

So you can fundamentally rethink some parts of the process too. So that's another area where we're very active. A third area, and maybe the one that might have been the most obvious one to start with is marketing, right? So a lot of where we use the generative models to produce products for realtors and for lenders to make it easy to produce marketing content, right? And to stay after and distribute that content, keep it fresh and target it, make it relevant for the person that you're sending it to.

And then the fourth area we're active right now is in sales and training, which a lot of people don't think about, but we run two different CRMs in our company. Yeah. You typically people have a hard time implementing one or you, I mean, everybody using one, you have to get two. Yeah. What's the rationale behind two?

Preference, preference. We've got one that really works well. One of our business lines, actually two of our business lines works great for them. Another one that works great for another business line. And the economics are not strong in terms of consolidating because the cost of consolidating is high, right?

So it's the simple answer there. For your direct title reps and direct offices, what CRM they use and how they leverage AI with that? So we use HubSpot there. We really like both of them. We like HubSpot and Agency.

We use Sugar, which we also use in our lender services business. HubSpot in our direct business, we've done a lot to leverage the data that we have available to us, kind of go beyond contact management and sort of good account management into creating real intelligence. of consolidating because the cost of consolidating is high, right? So that's the simple answer there. For your direct title reps and direct offices, what CRM they use and how they leverage AI with that?

So we use HubSpot there. We really have both of them. We like HubSpot and Agency, we use Sugar, which we also use in our lender services business. HubSpot in our direct business, we've done a lot to leverage the data that we have available to us. Kind of go beyond contact management and sort of good account management into creating real intelligence to drive the sales process and the relationship process for our sales reps and our escrow officers.

So a lot of the AI focus there is just take the massive data where we really do pour a lot of information into that CRM from our production system and from other places and synthesizing it into a form where not only is it intelligible, but it's actionable and you can pull events out of it and you can trigger events for our sales reps that cause them to go out and do the right thing at the right moment for the right customer, that really helps. You have HubSpot dumping, I'm sorry, the title production software. I don't know if you want to share, I know what you use, but I don't know if you want to share it or not, but it connects with HubSpot and it just dumps that data and then that's creates intelligence for the report. Yeah, we use a generative piece that sort of layers on top of it called a plugin, right, as sort of a, not a native product go in through the HubSpot API or the sugar API. This is the way you access a lot of your tools with the AI tools is, you know, going through the API, pull stuff out and do something with it and either put it back in the system or move it into a different part of the process.

So for us, the focus is on the reps or the escrow officers efficiency, but also the manager, right? Just synthesizing for the manager, what they need to be paying attention to, because it's hard, right? There's a lot of information and there's a lot of activity on the part of the reps. What advice would you give title professionals on like a baby steps or getting their feet wet with AI and take that a mystery or fear out of it? The, so they're, fortunately they're really easy steps to take is everybody's got vendors who are already doing these things, right?

And so turning them on, so to speak, and using them in the tools that you already have is a great introduction to how powerful they can be for you. Right. And most vendors are now offering, depending on the type of system you're talking about, something in your CRM, if you use one that will do some of these things, right, in some basic ways, and maybe some ways that are even more, you know, sophisticated production system vendors, I would say increasingly have partnerships and maybe in the future we'll have sort of more organic or native forms of AI within the products, but they're definitely partners that are easy to engage and can create some sort of powerful integrations with your existing production system to do wonderful things for you with documents and with content and with data, et cetera. So leverage those, they're available in the marketplaces for each of those systems. And for the most part, easy to turn on.

Obviously, he has got to be involved in this question. So what are some emerging technology, the trends you believe will significantly impact the real estate industry as a whole? So first of all, I think there will like, I'll start with positive sort of green field, blue sky stuff that's exciting, but yet you can't in our industry, ignore the scary things, either the fraud, you know, because there's just as much innovation on the dark side there is on the greenfield side. So on the side of good, the way we deal with data will only become more powerful because there's so much more data available to us than we currently use. And there are ways of using it that are so much more powerful than most of what we're doing as an industry.

So again, sort of to your point you made earlier about people wanting to do the same things the same way. You can't force that issue, right? Technology is not going to force that issue. That's my experience over a long time of doing this is that people who try to force the issue end up on the wrong side of the wrong side of history, so to speak, right? But you can be as adaptive and have a vision for how you're going to pull in and use data more efficiently as part of your search and exam process.

Really, I would say build on some of the innovations that I was just referring to in the instant world, but moving away from that sort of instant type technology into the entire process of search, exam, distribution, underwriting, all kinds of ways an AI driven world can sort of flow through your process, which means that you can use, you know, different sources of data, lower cost sources of data. You can enhance and enrich your data from different sources and come up with a much more powerful search product in addition to being more powerful with the way you interact with that product through your customers and deliver it to your customers. I look across the industry and I see many people engaged in different variants of that, so I know the opportunity is real because there are lots of people coming at it from different angles and I think there will be lots of different implementations that, you know, that add, you know, significant new efficiencies to the industry. I think that some of that will be manifested as products that do try to bring that 45 day cycle down and we'll see if technology is the problem that's keeping that at a 45, 45 day level. I don't think it is.

And I'll just from the comment you made, I don't think you think it is. It's structural reasons and you know, but one of the things you encounter as a technologist is you can, you can deliver something with a higher efficiency and find that the customer's not, I don't want to say not ready for it, but there are other contingencies they have where it doesn't fit, you know, like accelerating something doesn't fit into another part of their process that isn't accelerated. Right. I think that's what happens a lot. I heard one of the conferences that I heard you speak, talk a lot about a user experience.

I can enhance it by doing a good job, a great job or great service. That's not enough, especially the millennials. They want us that, how do you feel their own process and how did that user experience, how smooth, how the communication process and meet them, what they want to be met, not kind of your way of doing things, but some advice or how you guys do things that you can, that can, our audience can really duplicate what you're doing to enhance that user experience. Yeah. I'll come at it from two different directions.

One is just the customer experience. So, you know, we're very focused on that. We measure it, we survey for it. We drive the way we manage people from customer satisfaction scores and NPS and that promoter score collection. We're very focused on the experience aspect of it.

Cause our belief is that most people don't really feel like they chose their title company. They did, but they don't feel that way necessarily. And so it's just, you know, somebody who comes into the process and there's a lot of, you know, a lot of paperwork and it's obscure and intimidating and then, you know, then it's over right in most cases. Right. And so we really do, for most people, they're benchmarking that experience closing, not against some other closing they did in the past, maybe, but most people don't do it that often.

Right. They did, it was years and years and years, years ago. Right. So people are benchmarking it off of other experiences they have. So, you know, is your technology the same as the technology I use on the internet all day long?

Right. That's my benchmark, a certain ease of use expectation that I have just from being a consumer of other things on the internet. And as a retail experience, we all have expectations of what it's like to go into somebody's storefront and what's a good experience and what's a bad experience. So we're a hundred percent committed to the experiential side of this. We train our people on it.

We've oriented our technology towards delivering it. We survey on it. We build on it. That's one aspect. The other aspect that I don't want to neglect is practitioner, the practitioner aspect of this.

Cause when you talk about millennials or Gen Z, or you talk about generational change and expectations, you cannot, as a new generation comes up in our industry, they're just not having it the way our people our age, when I'm presuming have been doing it in the way our parents did it. And there are so much of our business is generational. So much of our business is family owned and inherited. That's true in brokerage. That's true in title agency.

And I know a lot of kids who come up, they filed for their parents and that's just the way it works. At some point they're going to get the reins and they might not have thought they wanted them, but a lot of them find that they do, but they're just not going to have it the way their parents had it, and they're going to drive a different experience too. I would like to shift gears towards NAR and also the war for the real estate platforms, the reason I want to shift that cause your experience and with realestate.com, what's your take on the whole NAR settlement, but most importantly, the war for the real estate platforms or who's going to, they'll own it forever, like, and like now homes.com is one. Yeah. It's a really interesting, the mark advertising budgets.

I mean, it's a really interesting, I mean, I did spend a lot of time in that landscape and I know the mechanics of it really, really well. And you just mentioned a billion dollars spend that's meaningful. You can buy an audience and what you do, whether you retain that audience, once you acquire them, that comes down to the quality of content and the quality of experience, just to clarify to our audiences, um, home.com, which is owned by costar was a big commercial platform. Yeah. Their budget this year is a billion dollars to get it, to gain market share of the online platform.

Yeah. And that sounds like a huge amount of money and it is a huge amount of money. But when you talk about a strategic value of being, we've already said it at that first point of contact that everybody wants to try to be at, but be the numbers involved. I mean, if you look at the numbers of people going to Zillow and realtor.com and homes now and Trulia and Redfin and other destinations sort of below that, it's in the hundreds of millions of unique users a month. So the cost of acquiring those eyeballs as they call them is high.

And the cost of reacquiring them is even higher if you don't offer a great experience once you get to that portal. So I think with respect to how the landscape's going to change as a result of regulation and the lawsuit settlements and all that kind of stuff, that's a hundred percent speculative. It could go in a lot of different directions, I guess, is the thing that I would say, the things that I would watch out for and be interested to see how they evolve is not who can spend the most and acquire the most audience because any one of them could do it as easily as any of the others. Right. And the issue is, I also think the issue personally.

that portal. So I think with respect to how the landscape's going to change as a result of regulation and the lawsuit settlements and all that kind of stuff, that's 100% speculative. It could go in a lot of different directions, I guess, is the thing that I would say. The things that I would watch out for and be interested to see how they evolve is not who can spend the most and acquire the most audience, because any one of them could do it as easily as any of the others, and the issue is, I also think the issue personally is not how many practitioners will there be in the future. People like to speculate on that, and I think it will change.

I'm not a big believer in theories of single causation, so here's just one sort of statement I'll make, which is I think you'll see the number of real estate agents decline over the next year or so, and a lot of people will be quick to attribute that to the settlements. Maybe that'll be true and maybe that won't be. We'll see when we get there, but I think if it happens, people ought to look carefully at the shift in the market as much as the shift in the landscape of how agents engage consumers and ask themselves if the change in the number of people in the business didn't have more to do with the fact that there was less business, because there's a pretty well-demonstrated cycle of when the market goes down, there's a lagging period of about a year before the number of practitioners in the market goes down. People hang on, market stays down, they ultimately exit the business. At some point, the market's going to go up again.

There's not a high barrier to entry to getting back into the business. I wouldn't be surprised if in a more sort of up-tempo market, they're back, notwithstanding any other big changes in the landscape. I just think that's the natural function of market cycles. What I do think is interesting out of all this is, and the thing to watch, is how content is developed will change, because there's this sort of focus on the MLS, right? There's a few possible scenarios here.

The MLS adapts to the fact that compensation isn't there anymore, or the MLS doesn't adapt to the fact that there's not compensation there anymore. And I bet there will be a ton of people diving in and declaring that there is a vacuum and trying to make a business case about that. We'll see if it works. But there's a lot, I think, that can be up for grabs here. Well, we're getting close to the conclusion of our show here.

What's a favorite quote that's part of your philosophy in life or in business? Wow, that's a tough one. I don't want to sound like I'm blowing smoke here, but one thing that Pat always says really rings true to me. It's not probably what you'd expect a technologist to say, but Pat says this all the time, and it's been true throughout my career, which is, he says, the second mouse gets the cheese. First mouse off, it's his neck snapped off, right?

So I love it for that reason, because it's true. It's been true in my experience that it's very easy. A lot of the technology that we're working on as an industry are variants of ideas that have been around for a long time, right? There haven't been a lot of new ideas, but there are a lot of ideas that have not been well executed or executed at all, right, or are in some lifecycle of execution. And a lot of people who are early to market with an idea, I like to, in some way, flatter myself and say, there are things that I've done in my own career that I thought needed to be done, and my timing was wrong, right?

Yeah, exactly. And I see people coming along and doing them, and I'm like, wait, I did that? But there's a lot of that in our industry. There are some things that we've all done well and some things that we were a little bit early with, but the second mouse really does get the cheese in terms of winning and being able to protect a leadership position. And you have to, there's another quote that I live by, which is sort of at odds with what I just said, but another mentor of mine, Joe Hanauer, early on at the first mover, sets the rules.

So I think both of those things have to live in sort of a tension with each other. You can set the rules and not get the cheese, but you can set the rules in motion. And I really do, like, there's a harmony of those two conflicting ideas that I think there's a lot to be learned from. Absolutely. How about either a favorite book of all time or an awesome book you read recently?

That's an interesting one, too. So first of all, I'd say I am not a big reader of business books. I've tried to get into those books and I think they have a lot of value, but for me, I'm more of a reader of literature and a reader of history. A lot of opposite. Yeah, exactly.

I read a lot and I try to balance my, if I only did my own thing, I'd read nonfiction all the time, but I understand that's not good for your brain. So I also focus on imagination. Exactly. But I don't read a lot of business books. I'm not going to make a sort of a citation there, but if I was to quote, if I was to sort of cite one book which has been influential in the way I think about business, and there are many on any given day, but one that I would say sort of stands out, there is, there's a great biography of J.P.

Morgan by Ron Chernow, you know, who wrote Hamilton, right? And just like all of his books, they're like, they're 10 inches thick, right? It's a lot of reading, but if you go, if you're into biography, and if you're into sort of the history of a capitalist dynasty and the ways that was established, you know, in the 19th century, a way of just sort of tracking the lineage of that all the way through to our current business environment, where you can look around after reading that book and see all the ways that one man a long time ago influenced the structure of everything. I mean, those structures have proven to be durable and persistent. You know, read that book.

Anyway, it was illuminating. Yeah. I don't read much fiction, but I'm big on biographies. Yeah, me too. I'd spend all my time there, like I said, if I could, but I try to be disciplined.

What final thoughts or wisdom do you have for our audience of title professionals? So I would say from a technology perspective, I think people have a challenge trying to figure out what technologies they should implement, maybe being a little anxious that they're behind the curve or not doing what they should be doing, whether they don't understand, right? And I would say for everybody who's got that sort of anxiety and that drive to be doing the best and the latest, which we all have, those two things together, the most important thing you can do is to be informed about what's really out there in production, what's sort of burned in enough that it's not hype, right? And it's not new, and it's not a first mouse type situation, right? But really inform yourself and educate yourself, but let things take some time to see where they're going before you jump and then jump on the things that have started to develop a proven and demonstrable track record.

Wisdom of FOMO is part of, if you're missing out, is part of our culture. Yeah, exactly. There's always an anxiety that you don't understand something and therefore you are missing out on it, but so inform yourself, but that doesn't necessarily equate into sort of jumping into everything, because you have to prioritize. Thank you so much for your time and for your wisdom. I'd love to have you again.

I love these conversations. It's been fun talking to you, Mo. So anytime. Take care. Thank you.

And that's a wrap on today's journey with Mo Shamil 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.

Together, 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.