The CA Insurance Commission has responded to an outraged real estate industry by sending a letter clarifying the limits of their regulations and relaxing the interpretations to exclude basic customer services like providing title profiles, copies of recorded docs, etc.
Consequently, California’s title insurance industry has re-established vital customer services for which the real estate and mortgage lending community has largely become dependent on.
However, there’s another side to this. I witnessed outraged real estate people, some active and some wannabies, not only cry foul of the temporary shutdown period, but acted as if the document services that they were accustomed to receiving for free were entitlements that they deserved. A few even rattled about the “Freedom of Information Act.”
This is lunacy. Nowhere is it written that title insurance companies, which are private, for-profit enterprises, are required to give out this information, let alone do so for free. That they have done so in the past is only a matter of tradition and due to competititive forces as some title companies use such data access to their advantage.
For starters, recorded documents are available for viewing to the public at each County recorder’s office, and online for some Counties. When I started in the business fax machines were not widely available nor where PC’s invented, so if I wanted to see a recorded image of a Grant Deed or Deed of Trust or other lien, I either had to visit the County recorder’s office directly, or persuade my title company to produce a photocopy and mail it to me.
Initially, when online documents became more widely available, but for a cost to the user, only a few could afford or justify the expense. Then title companies, desperate to attract or at least maintain business, began offering access to these services for free or nearly free, at least for established customers.
The other side of this is that by not offering these services so freely, real estate investors and industry people could create a de facto barrier to entry to others wishing to enter the investing or real estate services arena. For established companies, this is a real advantage, and perhaps there are other advantages that can be explored from the perspective of benefits to consumers.
But my primary satisfaction would come from seeing the elimination of people who demand these services from the title companies and then casually and abusively take more and more resources from the customer service portion of these vendors, for which the expense is surely passed along to the ultimate customer.
So, there’s two sides to this controversy, for which you might see an advantage to you directly should this area yet again be revisited.
