Posted by ReneeK_MI on 9/29/06 12:47pm
Msg #149287
Stewart ALONE u/w for over 6,000 agents in 49 states
Since it appears many people do not fully understand the impact of having Stewart, LandAm and FirstAm hooked up w/ the NNA ...
Those 3 companies are Title Insurance Underwriting companies. All of the loans you're closing come out of a title agency (and please let's not get into semantics), and every agency is underwritten by someone. You're not going to be working DIRECTLY for the U/W company, and will not often be aware of who they are. You're working for the agencies, or a ss to those agencies.
Some underwriting companies ALSO issue policies under their own name, as well. In THAT circumstance, you would be working for them more directly. (Like with Stewart/E-Title, First Am, not sure about LandAm)
Now, I'm not researching this but did pull up some figures from Stewart (6,000 agents) and my guess (and I'm pulling this from the air) is Stewart is the smaller of the 3 named agencies.
You are working 'for' these people, you just don't know it. Let's ASSUME all three are the same size as Stewart - that's nearly 20,000 title agencies/settlement agents across the nation.
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Reply by Charles_Ca on 9/29/06 2:00pm
Msg #149304
You are correct in what you say Renee. The problem that I have is that the six companies while wholly owned by the title companies are autonomous operating units of the mentioned title companies. I have a working relationship with First American Title (my favorite title company) and also Stewart. In my work as a real estate agent I prefer to work with companies who own their own title plants and all three do. That being said and being most familiar with the two operating entities of First American (Title and SS) I have a hard time reconciling the operations of First American Title with those of First American's Signing Service. It has been my experience that First American Title companies personnel are knowledgeable, friendly, efficient and above all extremely professional. All of the dealings that I have had with their Signing Service have been just the opposite. I suspect that under the pressure of their respective boards of directors that the Title companies are pressing their subsidiaries to this is the only way the subsidiaries know how to react, possibly with a little probing from the NNA. A likely scenario might have been that one of the signing services in a casual discussion with an NNA staff member may have casually remarked about the security possibilities of GLB and then the NNA came up with a possible program and marketed it to the others until they got a consensus and the went public. Remember the official statement of the six signing services is that they support using the "NNA proposed" system. I am not sure that they are saying that the NNA has the only system they will use, and in fact I believe it would be foolish of them to lock themselves into a commercial product. Like most business I suspect that the Title companies will come up with a corporate-wide procedure the implementation of which will be a standard that must be complied with and then as long as the procedure is complied with the background check will be acceptable.
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