James,

Thank you for the informative response.  Yeah, as I googled to learn more about the title industry, escrow and closing came up prominently.   I'm sure these software companies and their product(s) have merits, but interestingly, an old hand in the title industry told me several weeks ago that XYZ company (one of the companies in your list) is not good (he's referring to their product), it won't be appropriate for me to name names here.

Fyi, to design and develop complex and in the meantime extremely easy to use software is challenging even for very experienced software professionals, and yet it's very doable.  A key element is to achieve good balance among functionality, complexity and ease of use, let's leave out cost for the moment.

And if I'm going to compete with any of them, it won't be feature by feature sort of dumb method, instead it would be either asymmetrical or ...

Again, I truly appreciate your useful input.

Don