In Minnesota, it looks as opponents have a 2-track strategy to undo AfBA's where RESPA has failed.  First, the Commerce Dept. (which regulates the industry) is going after the lender/broker/realtor minority partners in the AfBA's for soliciting and negotiating for title insurance policies without a license to do so.  This appears to be the functional equivalent of what you're talking about (I'm not sure the result would be all that different if the minority partners were licensed, but their LOs, realtors, etc., who are NOT title company employees, were doing the soliciting and negotiating).  Second, a new lawsuit is focusing on those with a fiduciary relationship (realtors, in this case) using the house title regardless of whether doing so would discharge the fiduciary obligation.

In addition, there is pending legislation ostensibly which addresses predatory lending, perhaps the most significant part of which establishes a fiduciary relationship between borrowers and mortgage brokers.

For my part, I am not an anti-AfBA purist.  I can see the merits of AfBA's which streamline process.  That is, I've seen applications of the AfBA model that don't fail what is to my mind the key test - are the title fees pumped for the sole purpose of fattening the bottom line of those who generate title work, but who actually do no title work?  Many of the large local realtor title AfBA's don't manifestly fail this.  Although their fees are a little higher, their service is pretty good , too.  (I'm talking about competitors, here.  I am not a shill).

Many of the more recent AfBA's, however, obviously have marked up fees for the purpose of giving extra money to a mortgage broker.  Loan officers are told to "sell the [higher] fees," if the customer notices.

Finally, the biggest problem I see with AfBA's is more of a market effect.  AfBA title providers, if they're smart, would only insure those deals which don't involve title defects (estimated to be roughly a third).  The riskier deals tend to get pushed out to those companies that really do have to compete, but they are competing to insure the riskier deals.   So, as the difficulty of closing the file goes up, there is some tendency 1) to have price-competitive agents do the harder work; or worse 2) to have "ethics competitve" agents do the work.  In this way - and I am pretty close to a market purist - the markets may be failing to 1) price risk adequately; and 2) allocate resources properly - closing harder files should, presumably result in better compensation or in some metric that would reflect same.