I totally agree, you do get what you pay for, and these companies demanding more and paying less will eventually be faced with lawsuits, and title issues and then wish they would have stayed with quality over cheap. There are a lot of companies utilizing systems that aren't even county certified, or that just buy the counties copies, so they build their own index, which eventually leads to human error of that index, of which lawsuits happen, especially when someone looks at the actual county and finds the missed document right away. We had one client that you could tell did all their own searches "Online", they sent us any metes and bounds, and anything that was terrible or complicated. Our practice with that company was charge them double our normal fees. We explained to them, if you send us all the easy ones, we would be happy to do the difficult ones for the same price. Our offices mantra "you don't get paid for the easy ones, you get paid for the difficult ones". They happily now pay the doubled price for those searches and never complain, makes you wonder how many they are doing "in house" to justify paying us so much higher. A Standardize fee I think is a good idea. It seems to me the title policies charged to the consumer hasn't gotten cheaper, so why are they trying to make more money off of the backs of the searchers, the ones that actually have considerable costs involved with driving, searching, copies, and the other associated fees involved.  When I first started doing title searches we were making $150 a current owner, and the policy wasn't any more expensive. Would be interested in actually seeing a breakdown on a title policy, and see truly what they are charging the consumer for the title search. My last refi when the title company showed me the fees they charged me $175 for the search. That was only a couple of months ago. 

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