Managing title work hasn’t changed since the 1980s.
Here’s the waste it produces:
1. Manual Tasks – Waste weeks per year on repetitive, manual, numbing administrative tasks for every parcel.
- Multiple team members request quotes on multiple parcels on multiple projects.
- Receive quotes, approve, and track completion progress
- Receive completed title work, name, save, share, store, find, access, track
- Emails get overlooked or forgotten once they go below the fold in inboxes.
- When busy, team members drag & drop files out of emails and onto desktops.
- When very busy, employees leave files in email inboxes
- Multiple storage locations in silos prevent access by team members
- Typos in naming conventions also make files disappear.
- Finding – Hunting and scrolling for files in inboxes, e-folders, and hardcopy folders.
- Identify action-required emails from vendors and respond to them, so their work can continue. Tracking whose court the ball is in is critical.
- Receive invoices, recall approved quotes, compare, communicate to correct invoices, collate, total, and send them to A/P team. Tracking past dues and paid invoices.
- A/P team performs data entry, tracks and pays invoices.
- Paying by check requires data entry, printing checks and envelopes, stuffing, sealing, posting and delivering. Dealing with lost checks and inquiries, making bank inquiries, incurring stop payment fees, and reissuing checks is a productivity drain.
2. Disconnected tools – Silent killers of productivity:
- Multiple email inboxes with countless email threads
- Spreadsheets that require data entry and color codes, which result in errors, omissions and backlogs.
- Shared drives and folders with strict naming conventions, mean lost files.
3. Type of title work you choose can waste months – Commitments vs. Search Reports
- Searches – Many developers save weeks to months by ordering search reports first. Why? When you order a title commitment, the title insurance company doesn’t earn revenue, so these searches are the lowest or priority for them. Then, once the search reports are completed, they review and then prepare the commitment for delivery to you.
- Much faster – When ordering searches, they will be delivered much faster – even by weeks – if you order them from search vendors that are approved by the title insurance companies.
- Money talks – Unlike title insurance companies, these search vendors earn their living from producing searches promptly.
- Convert search into a commitment – When it comes time for you to get a commitment, simply give this search to the title insurance company and they will a) get it updated from the same vendor and then b) send you a title insurance commitment. Simple and easy.
- Commitments – They show the same search report data but in the format of a commitment to insure the lender that will finance the purchase of your project. If you do searches first, then when its time to order a commitment, simply choose the title insurance company and the search report will be upgraded into a commitment format.
- Attorney on staff? If you don’t have in-house attorneys, then ordering commitments is likely the way to go, even though they take weeks longer. However, if you have attorneys on your real estate team, then ordering searches is by far the faster choice in the due diligence stage.
- Fatal Flaw Discovery – Speed of discovery saves weeks to months, permitting you to engage your next project sooner and cease pouring in good money after bad.
4. Delayed Response to Actions Required costs you months –
- The #1 cause of delays in title work completion of searches and commitments.
- Providers discover problems with parcels, and they notify your team. Their work cannot continue until your team replies with an answer.
- Weeks to months of delays are routinely caused by overlooking or missing these action items (data requests) from providers.
- Your team does not have centralized tracking for action-required items.
- Due to work silos, a manager can’t know which team members are delaying title work. Non-transparency means no accountability.
5. Work silos hold managers hostage – preventing improvement
Attorney, non-attorney, experienced or inexperienced? It does not matter. The real estate due diligence manager is held hostage by employees having all their valuable files, processes, status, and all elements of their workflow locked in their minds, desktops and inboxes.
- The processes in each work silo vary considerably.
- Silos mask individual employee performance.
- Lacks accountability. T
- Unknown sources of weeks and months of delays – was it truly the title search vendor or title insurance company delays? You’ll never know.
- Cannot tell who needs coaching or improvement.
- The manager is at the mercy of the anecdotal evidence, not empirical data to know who is “busy” vs. actually productive.
6. Work silos kill productivity, drop balls and wreak havoc –
When answers or files are needed, and the teammate is unavailable short-term or long-term (lunch, illness, PTO, turnover), there is no way to access that person’s files and workflow. This leads to
- Forensic audits to determine what work was done, when, by whom and where it is.
- Duplication of work – re-ordering and paying.
How to prevent this waste?
Automate title management – keep all your favorite providers – and pay no subscription fees.
Save weeks to months in title due diligence on every solar project.
Learn more at www.TitleLeader.com
