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Targeted National Marketing: It beats the Yellow Pages
by Robert Franco  | 2010/02/04
It has been a while since my last blog about our enhanced listing services. I still get a lot of questions about how it works and what the benefits are, so I thought it would be a good idea to explain it again. Over the course of the past year, our directory was searched an average of more than 14,000 times each month, proving that Source of Title is still the premier source for finding independent title professionals. But, without an enhanced listing, many of them may not be finding your company.
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Categories: Abstractors, General Interest, Marketing, Opportunities, Title Industry
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Imitation Is The Sincerest Form Of Flattery
by Robert Franco | 2008/01/10
I am flattered! It is true what they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. When I began working on Source of Title in 2002, it was because I had a lot of clients calling me asking for referrals for counties I did not cover. Often times, I just didn't know anyone and I thought there really should be an easier way for potential clients to find abstractors. After all, if my clients are having trouble finding abstractors in other counties, there must some out there that can't find me.
The first thing I did was look online to see if I could find any other abstractor directories. Who wants to reinvent the wheel? I didn't find any, so I buried my head in programming books for the summer and create the first version of the site myself. It was very rudimentary, but functional. By the time we started to grow, there were a few other sites offering an abstractor directory. Since we were all in the very early stages of growth, I don't think any of us copied the others. In fact, we all had very different plans for how to model our sites. It was obviously going to come down to who implemented the best plan as to which directory would become the standard.
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Categories: Abstractors, Innovation, Opportunities, Title Industry
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That's My Picasso
by Robert Franco | 2007/03/27
This a new one for me. With the real estate market slowing down, and by extension the title industry, innovative new sources of revenue are being sought out to compensate. In New York, one title agency has decided to pursue a collateral market for insuring title to valuable works of art. Liberty Title Agency has recently formed Liberty Art Title Agency to offer their clients "fine art insurance."
Liberty will serve as an authorized independent agent of ARIS Corporation to market and sell ATPI(R), fine art insurance, in New York. ARIS is the only insurer to offer true title insurance for the fine art market. The company received regulatory approval for the insurance in New York in May 2006. Fine art insurance is expected to do for fine art what title insurance originally did and continues to do for real estate, that is, create liquidity and standardization of the transaction for an industry which is largely unregulated and which relies on laws created for different industries to resolve art ownership disputes.
Liberty Title Agency, LLC, was launched six years ago and now has offices in Manhattan, Uniondale and Westchester, New York. The company recently passed $25 billion in closings. "We at Liberty Title understand the title issues which our clients face with real estate and by extension appreciate the need equally to protect their art collections against ownership disputes. We firmly believe that we can help our real estate clients navigate the title issues they face with their art collections," stated Madden.
It would be very interesting to know what the premium would be for a $60 million Picasso, like the one pulled from an auction at Christie's last November over a claimed ownership dispute. The painting, Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto, was claimed "sold under duress in Nazi Germany" and an heir of a former owner filed suit to recover ownership.
Like anything of value that can be subject to law suits resulting from disputes of ownership, whether it is art or real estate, title insurance helps create a stable market and provides buyers and sellers with confidence which increases the item's value. It will be interesting to see what other new opportunities present to the title industry in a time while title insurance sales are likely to continue to decline.
Robert A. Franco
SOURCE OF TITLE
rfranco@sourceoftitle.com
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Categories: Opportunities, Title Industry
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