How to Build a Scalable Title Production Workflow | Ep 65

In a world where change is the only constant, Mo Shumil 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. Hi, everybody. This is Hope Adhaviani from ATG Title.

And I am just going to go back to the basics with you, because in this day and age with all the technology and AI, it's easy to get lost in the transaction and in the process. And speaking of processes, let's talk about processes and automation, how to scale and succeed. Now, understanding the title side of real estate can be very superfluous. It can be confusing, ambiguous sometimes. Not a lot of people know what we do.

So understanding it all, and especially our part in the puzzle, is crucial. This presentation will break down the process into manageable chunks and explore the roles of automation and streamlining the real estate transaction. You'll understand everybody's part in the process, especially how to take a step back and look at things in a different lens and a different perspective. This podcast is brought to you by Struggling to set appointments and generate leads? What if you had a team working behind the scenes to help you book more meetings and close more deals?

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Well, title insurance process involves hundreds of tasks. So many duties that are tied to every milestone and process of the transaction that people kind of take for granted. And honestly, the best way to think of it is just simplify because out of those thousands and hundreds of tasks, you got to take a step back and again, look at it smaller. And as my visionary CEO always tells me, how do you eat an elephant? You have to eat it one bite at a time.

You have to break it into chunks or it's going to be overwhelming. So breaking down those intricate steps into manageable pieces is the only way to scale and automate and build your process, build that foundation. So the importance of this is to maintain and consistently have a structured approach because it's essential to navigating the complexities of title insurance and ensuring a smooth transaction. If you just throw all your tasks and duties and roles onto a page, it's going to look overwhelming. So you have to break it down.

Well, what's the first thing you do? Well, I'm going to get a contract, right? Of course, you're going to receive a contract. So let's go to the next slide. Break down that process.

First milestones and accountabilities. You have to first define those milestones like opening a contract or order open. Title search process, title review process. So define those clear milestones and that will help you manage the complex title insurance process. Once you define those clear milestones or groups, then you can assign those specific tasks and duties to roles and to groups.

This will allow you to better track and hold your team accountable, especially since everybody is virtual. Those tasks in your TPS and your title platform are huge. It's going to be hugely impactful because everybody is virtual. You can't just walk into their office anymore. You can't just tap them on the shoulder, come to my office, please, we have to talk about the paper file that you had.

No, everything's online. Everything's digital, especially with AI being incorporated into our workflows now. Tasks is the way to go and you have to monitor them, track them, report. So after you define your milestones and hold people accountable, you go to group two. Assignment groups and organizing the process.

So now you've got your milestones, you've got your duties. Now you have to have the who. Make sure they're the right who in the right spot. So organize the process into assignment groups. This allows for more efficient team collaboration.

I'm going to go through what that looks like in the next few slides. This structure provides transparency and makes it easier to monitor the progress throughout the various stages. So I'm going to also go through what we used to do with paper files, how we used to do it, and then now what it looks like with AI and technology and remote people. The last step, and you know, this is just in a nutshell, but the last step is implementation. You can talk the talk, but are you going to walk the walk?

So you can put it all out. You can do your impact filters. You can put up slides like this and write it all out, but you have to implement it. If you can't do it, find somebody who's going to implement it. Because if you just keep putting it on the back burner, you're never going to be able to move to the next step.

You're never going to be able to grow and you're never going to be able to scale. So implementation. Now that you have your milestones, who is responsible for the group? Now you've got to put all that talk into action. So build the workflows into your TPS platform to ensure efficiency and make sure you set up reports to track the completion and ownership.

Again, everybody's virtual. We have a company that's national. I think only five people are in my corporate location, but we have 85 employees nationally. So you really have to track by reports and tasks. So hopefully your platform will allow you to run those reports weekly, daily, and you have to go through them.

You can't just run them to run them. It doesn't mean anything if you're not reviewing them. So I run them weekly, daily, and then I have branch reports for every branch or every location and everybody has to be held accountable. This podcast is made possible by our sponsor. You have worked so hard to build your business.

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You know, you have the initial order and title search. That process begins with placing an order, you know, when the contract comes in from a realtor or lender, and then conducting a thorough title search. Then you have to examine that title search, and then you have to clear title. Now, I don't know about you guys, but I have been noticing a lot of messier titles nationally. We're getting wholesale, short sales.

We're getting back to the, you know, 2009 through 2011 deals. They're very messy. So it's going to take a little bit more time for the clearance of title. So we have a curative team, and we'll go through that in the next slide. Step three is document preparation.

You know, sending title to the lender, collaborating with them, and then putting together the closing documents per municipality or per state, and per transaction. You might have commercial. You might have residential. You might have new construction. Every transaction type has different documents.

Then you go to step four, closing and settlement. This is the final step that involves the closing of the transaction, bringing everybody to the table, which nowadays, let's be honest, people aren't even coming to the table anymore. You can start incorporating RON, remote online notarization, mail aways. There's a lot of military people or people overseas. Make sure your underwriter approves those platforms.

And then a lot of your lenders are doing hybrid e-closings as well. So they have what sign docs and ink sign docs. So you've really got to, you know, know the parties of the transaction and know your lender, know your client too. The last step is post-closing. People just think that you drop the file post-closing, and then you're on to the next one.

There is a lot of tasks and duties that go into the post-closing process that people don't see because it's on the back end. It's behind a screen. So the process concludes with post-closing activities and ensuring a smooth transition. as well. So they have wet sign docs and ink sign docs.

So you've really got to, you know, know the parties of the transaction and know your lender, know your client too. The last step is post-closing. People just think that you drop the file post-closing and then you're on to the next one. There is a lot of tasks and duties that go into the post-closing process that people don't see because it's on the back end, it's behind a screen. So the process concludes with post-closing activities and ensuring a smooth transition.

But again, that could come with 100 tasks in itself. So next slide, let's kind of go over the old way. The old way, you know, how we here at ATG, how we used to do it is we had paper files. I think the last time we had paper files was 2010. We've been digital ever since, completely paperless, but paper files where you had the cover page on the front of the folder, you printed everything, and then at some point you scanned it in, hopefully, so that you do keep those copies.

In your head, there were tasks. You didn't really have to write them out. You didn't really have any tracking or accountability. It was all in your head. And a lot of veteran people in the industry, they still have it in their head.

So it's really hard to get them transitioned into the tasks and the milestone. So it was in your head and you also had one person handling it all. You had one escrow officer doing start to finish, and maybe they had an assistant, and that assistant would do the HOAs and payoffs. And that worked for a small outfit, but if you want to scale, if you want to succeed, if you want to grow, you have to automate. So if you want to scale, you have to automate, and you have to get it digital, and you have to run tasks and reports.

So this whole one person handling it all, one assistant dedicated, as you can see from the image over here, one person is kind of doing everything, but then that caused burnout. That caused lack of accountability and lack of ownership, honestly. This podcast is proudly sponsored by... Need extra hands without extra overhead? Meet Safi Virtual, your on-demand team of virtual assistants trained specifically for the title industry.

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So the new way or the way to scale, this is just how we're implementing our process. And we just started this this year because we went national recently. So we had to kind of take a step back, put on a different lens, and we had to utilize our system, Qualia, to the best of its ability. So we, instead of having one person handle it all, we broke it into milestones. So that's step one, you got to find the milestones.

And usually it's general. The core workflow is pretty similar nationally. So the first one is preprocessing. We call it preprocessing. You can call it data entry, order open, whatever.

But preprocessing, and what do they do? They digitally open the file. They prepare a prelim CD if needed. And then they request the buyer info sheets, and they order the title search. Now, depending on the municipality or state, they also order the municipal lien search.

So all this is done in that first milestone. And we have a group doing it. So we have an assignment group of three people, not just one, because we're national. So the only way to scale and automate is have a group doing it. And we have tasks set to round robin.

So if you open up your task workflow, each task is assigned to you based on the contract being open. So all of this, I've also automated as much as possible. So the tasks, these are all tasks, but as long as you're doing the movement in the file, they will autocomplete themselves. So it's not like you have to remember to go back in every single time, though I want you to, I want my team to, they can also autocomplete. So when they send out an email for the request buyer info sheet, that task will autocomplete based on that email template.

Same thing with the request seller info sheet, same thing with the info sheets for the agents. And also if you're familiar with qualia, as long as you add an email, you can also set up everything automatically with those digital info sheets on the back end. A lot going into that, but this should take at least 10 minutes. So you should be able to do 30, 40 in a day per person. Step two, apologies.

Step two is vendor management. So this person, this is just one person right now, but all they're doing is receiving the title searches and making sure that it's the right one. Do the parcels match, do the properties match, do the owners match. They have a little checklist and they go through and they save it to the file. That is their only job.

They monitor the abstractors performance. And if it's a vendor that we don't want to use anymore because their title searches are incomplete, then we mark them off the list and we move forward with finding new vendor relationships. So they pretty much receive and review the title search and save it to the file. After that, it goes straight to title processing. And these are kind of like in between the same three and four, kind of the same, but title processing, they type the commitment.

And remember, it's just data entry. They're typing the commitment and they're generating the ICL as long as they have the title request. So once they title commitment is typed, and that's also a group of three on round robin tasks, then it goes into the curator department. This is again, a separate department because we have so many title issues in this industry right now. The title curative department will add tasks for every curative item that they are, that they are clearing.

So if there's four judgments that attach to the seller or the property, they're going to add a judgment one, judgment two, judgment three. And that way your escrow officer can kind of go in the file and see that milestone of curative items and see where they're at. You can add notes, you can add tasks, additional tasks, and you can add milestones to each task. So after the curative, we moved to the title processing and the processor docs. This is your quintessential pre-processor, right?

They order the HOA, they order the payoff, they order the survey, order the deed, all that stuff. That's the backend stuff. We're all used to that one person, but instead of that one assistant doing all of it, they're just focusing on their one set of duties. This moves into the second one and going into the closing coordinator, we've split the closing coordinator and the escrow officer so that you can scale. You can take on more volume and still maintain that client satisfaction.

So the closing coordinator, they're just reviewing all the documents that are received. They're following up, they're reviewing the contract, they're adding notes, they're reviewing all the info sheets, especially with those new laws coming out with the NAR, the commission bifurcated splits, you have to review all the documents. And honestly, this is a job in itself because you don't want to miss anything. We don't want to have shortages. We don't want to miss anything for the closing statement.

So let the closing coordinator be that person who has really meticulous eye for detail. So they go through all of the information and they send title to the lender. So all the information is pretty much done when you send title to the lender. That's weeks before closing. And then it goes to the escrow officer and the escrow officer, all they're focusing on is balancing CDs and closing prep.

So they have to drive over all the documents, make sure the deed is done properly, quality control. So kind of what the closing coordinator does, but just making sure everything's up to date. Everything's already in the file. They're just making sure everything's up to date and all the figures are accurate. And then you go into the post-closing and the recording, which is the last part of it.

But again, all of these tasks, these milestones, they have certain duties assigned to them, and then they are assigned to just those small duties. So it's just splitting your groups into smaller duties instead of one person handling it all. And with this, you should be able to take on more volume, maintain client satisfaction, get better ratings, and have better files with less shortages. Today's episode is sponsored by Hey, you title agents, stop wasting time digging for answers or waiting on an email or call back from your underwriter. With title gpt.ai, you get instant, reliable answers to your title questions fast.

No more delays, work smarter, close faster, and keep deals moving. Try www.titlegpt.ai today. So another thing about the new workflow and the new age is having the clients involved. Now we don't want all of them involved, right? Because it might overwhelm them.

And then they'll start asking too many questions and redundant or ambiguous questions. So we just have a dominoes tracker. And I'm sure if you're familiar with qualia, you see that little tracker, and that tracker is tied to those tasks and milestones. So that's why it's so crucial for your team members to mark those tasks complete, because it'll move that dominoes tracker, that little tracker milestone thing that the clients see, it'll move it along, like a little train on its train tracks getting to the end of the line. So clients can view the key milestones and tasks involved in the title insurance process.

So they know a little more, they can educate. And our client portal also has a little question mark tool that they can learn a little bit more about title insurance, you can customize it, add more educational tools. And that way, it's just right there in their library, so they can kind of answer their own questions as needed. This will provide them with full transparency into the progress of their It'll move it along like a little train on its train tracks getting to the end of the line. So clients can view the key milestones and tasks involved in the title insurance process so they know a little more, they can educate.

And our client portal also has a little question mark tool that they can learn a little bit more about title insurance. You can customize it, add more educational tools, and that way it's just right there in their library so they can kind of answer their own questions as needed. This will provide them with full transparency into the progress of their transaction because at the end of the day, that's what they want. They wanna know what is going on. They don't want any communication.

It's better to over communicate than not communicate, which is why automation is so huge. So we also set up automatic connect messages to the client. Hey, just checking in with you. And these are all automatic. We don't have to manually send them out.

They're automatic based on tasks. So when a task is complete, an automatic message goes out to them. That's the only way to scale. That's the way to maintain communication with your clients and keep them happy. They also get real time updates similar to the Domino's Tracker, as I just mentioned.

The client portal offers real time updates, allowing clients to stay informed and engaged throughout the entire journey. And then again, improved communication. That's what we all want. Don't under communicate, over communicate. Don't under promise, over promise, and over deliver.

Or over deliver. The client portal enhances communication, fostering increased trust and satisfaction as clients can actively participate in and monitor the progress of their transaction. I also put a little note here that they can rate you because our TPS platform offers a rating and we have to keep it by five, right? So it goes one to five. And at the end of the transaction, they can rate you or the processor or the escrow officer.

And we have always had 4.8 to five stars on every transaction in every branch. And that is our goal with this new workflow. And that's the end of the slideshow, the transaction journey with me. Again, I just want to mention that you should simplify. Don't over complicate things.

Because when you look at all of your tasks and duties, we all know a lot goes into title insurance, right? A lot, a lot, a lot. So you could add 7,000 tasks, but is that really the best way to look at it? No, you simplify. You have your core workflow nationally.

Now that we're national, every purchase workflow is pretty much the same. It's those little county municipal nuances that you can build in later. So have your core workflow for each transaction type. And then based on those tasks, you can add trigger tasks for each municipality, for each state and for each county. That's the best way to look at it.

Simplify, don't over complicate it. And you will be able to scale and automate and keep your clients happy. Thank you everybody. I hope this was more informational and educational. In a world where change is the only constant, Mo's Chamille 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.