What is title insurance and why should anyone care?
Right? Nobody knows what we do. Our world is divided into two places. We do title side and we do escrow settlement side.
The title side is looking through the public records, identifying documents, who owns the property, what leans are out there and other things that have to do with the property itself. Once we get that together we call that the title commitment, then we move to the escrow side. That's where we start putting the numbers together. What's the purchase price who's paying the taxes? What mortgages are getting paid off that kind of thing?
Yeah, the insurance product itself really ensures the new buyer from a bunch of different things that could happen, or third-party interests that could come out of the woodwork down the road.
Right? That's the only type of insurance you can get for that level of protection and it's not just those losses but also the legal fees in case someone ever does challenge it. Because we always say it's almost as expensive to be right sometimes as it is to be wrong.
Yeah, if you're refinancing it happens to be ensuring the lender that they're lean or their new mortgage is going to be in first priority. After the closing all the insurance rates for title insurance are filed with the State of Michigan. There's a number of insurance underwriters that we represent and they all file their rates with the State of Michigan interestingly. Most of the rates are all about the same because anytime you've got people filing their rates everybody's looking at each other's rates as far as closing fees. There's closing fees involved as well. And those are typically market rate driven rights. It's some particular specialty property. But so at least in Michigan title insurance rates, and the fees are are pretty much either regulated or market driven.
