The past few weeks have not been kind to many of my friends at  title companies.  Last week I learned that a friend of mine — the office manager for a Placer Title Branch near me who’d been there twenty years or more — had just been laid off.

This morning I met with a sales rep for another Placer Title service area who wanted to meet me after a very successful escrow one of my agents and I had done with one of her escrow officers.   This was an escrow with some real title problems that needed to be addressed — and the escrow officer did a great job on it. 

In an ironic twist, the new sales rep I met from Placer Title and the escrow officer who’d done such a good job had recently moved to Placer Title after having been laid off by Commerce Title.

To add insult to irony, while I was waiting to meet with the new Placer Title rep, I learned from another real estate broker that another company I’d worked with in the past — Citrus Heights based Financial Title — had just closed its doors in California.  You can read more about that closure here.

Some Background

As the greater Sacramento market has contracted, at least two factors have combined to make area title companies particularly vulnerable.  First, one of the mainstays of title company revenue — home refinances — have declined sharply as declining property values have eroded the equity that so many homeowners traditionally tapped.   Secondly, many of the escrows we’re doing now are REO escrows, and many of the banks with REOs to sell are sending all their escrows through a single (often out-of-state) title company.  We’ll have more on the legality of this and the impact on the buyer in a future article.

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