What Is Title Work and Why It's Crucial | REIal Talk Podcast | Real Estate | EP. 30

Hi, guys. Welcome back to another episode on Real Talk, which is Real Talk for real estate investors. We are on episode 30 and I am here with our transaction coordinator, Tiffany Biddle.

Hello.

And today we are going to be diving into a little bit on what she does for the Freedom Real Estate Group family of companies and kind of see, like what I just said, see what I do. See, Cut that part out.

That's fine. It's great.

But yeah, see what you do. And you've been here with the company pretty much since it started, I believe. So you've seen a lot of changes happen. So I'm interested honestly to really see and hear what you do because I think I know this much about it. So I'm excited.

Yeah. And we talked a little bit before this, but.

All right, so I'm going to go ahead and start with the first question on what exactly do you do on the purchase side when we buy a property?

All right, so on the purchase side, you know, the purchase and sale processes are very different. For what I do, I have to say that I have Carla that works with me and she's fantastic because for the purchase side, she does the majority of the work. So this is the perfect time to mention Carla is awesome. Shout out to you, Carla. She works with me. We really, we get the contract from our acquisitions team, we set up the files, we send it off to the title company. The title company is actually my mother in law's title company. She's the owner. My husband works there as well. So I've got a nice quick connection and whenever I need an answer, I just call him, which you can call anybody, but you know, it's more direct. When it's your mother in law, they'll answer, but we send that off to them. I then work with while Carla is really setting everything up in our side and, you know, making sure that everyone has the right information in all the different places. I'm usually working on lining up private lending. So I work with all of our private, private lenders and I create a funding packet for them, send it off to them with some information. They typically say, yes, I'd love to fund this deal. And then we get going from there. I'll check in with Title, you know, a couple times up until closing, make sure that the title work is clear and that everything is good, everything's scheduled, make sure we get our funds and all of our docs and actually sign all the documents as well. And then we are closed. So after that, it's kind of off my plate. You Know, I close out some things in our system, but it kind of goes off my plate then as an urgent item that I must do. It's more of an overseeing until it sells, right? Yeah.

So then the sell process is a little different. So you kind of get a break in between the A to B closing from B to C. So what does the B2C closing look like whenever we sell a property?

Yeah, so when we sell a property, ideally, I'd love if it was, you know, easier process like when we purchase, but there are just a lot more parties involved. So, you know, you've got the, the investor who's buying the property, you've got the title company. You also have their lender, most likely. You have an appraiser, you have an inspector. There are all these people that I'm communicating with and I'm coordinating that whole timeline. Carla again, you know, she sends out all of the intro stuff at the beginning and gives them, hey, here's your steps, here's what we need to do. And then I help really coordinate all of those steps going forward. Usually, you know, depending on the lender, 30 day turnaround, where when we purchase it, sometimes they want to close in like three days, but when we purchase, it's usually like one to two weeks versus the sale when it's usually around 30 days with working with the lender. And I just coordinate all that stuff and then sign the docs again. I do all of that closing out the file in our system, you know, we do all that stuff. But really we already know the title is clear. So that is what's good about when we're selling. You know, our title company is fantastic. They will find every little title issue that you can think of. They will find it. And so there's kind of, I think drives our acquisitions company a little crazy because they keep stopping a lot of deals from going through. But it's great because what we're giving to our investors is a clear title, you know? Um, yeah, I never thought about it that way.

Yeah, um, that's, that's, that's interesting. That shines some light on the whole process. Yeah, um, that's interesting. I'm gonna have to share that with Lauren just so she can kind of understand it a little bit as well. Yeah, because I did not know that. Um, which again is why I was so excited for this podcast. I'm like, I don't really know what Tiffany does.

I could tell when you were googling what the transaction coordinator does.

Yeah, I walked in here, I was.

Like, are you trying to figure out what I do? Well.

And so, like. And I. I guess I always knew, like, I have always heard you guys talk about, like, the inspection and all of that, and I. But I never really pieced together that you actually work with them. Yeah, I never really thought about it. And I was like, yeah, even with.

The inspection, I mean, I am. I act as the go between, you know, between the investor and the rehab team, between Bulldog. So I am the go between for that. I get your inspection report and I line item out, hey, here's all the things the inspector noted. How do you want to respond to these? What can we do to fix these? Or what do we need to do? They give their responses, I send them off. I just kind of play telephone back and forth. But I relay all of that stuff between parties. Everything. It's. Yeah, every little thing. There's usually something that I or Carla are doing in that process. Yeah.

I guess I just always assumed, like, specifically the inspection report, that I just always went straight to Bulldog.

No.

So, man. Okay.

Yeah.

So this kind of. All the questions kind of correlate, but what you've. Like I said in the beginning, you've been here since pretty much the beginning. So what has changed from 2017 to now?

A lot. I was the third employee hired. So when I came in, there were five of us, and we were, you know, we were very, very close knit. One of the things, you know, I was just telling you before this, but we would get. It was so rare to close a property, you know, because we had just ramped up business. We had like five properties in our, you know, arsenal or whatever it was. And. Yeah, and I don't know if that's even the right word, but we would. We would get a clear to close from a lender or, you know, if it was a cash sale, they were ready to go. And we would literally run around the office.

Like, we got the clear to close high five.

We got the clear to close high five bust in Danny and Flip's offices. Like, we got the clear to. You know, everyone was like, passing out high fives. Could you imagine if we did that now?

Oh, my gosh.

I would get a lot of steps on my watch, running around the office, running all the way back to the office, flying to the Philippines to high five all of our virtual. Virtual team members. But yeah, so that is one thing that, to me, is like the biggest thing that has changed. Not that there's not excitement, because there still is so much excitement. Yeah. When we're closing properties And. Oh, yeah, you know, doing what we're supposed to do. Right. Keeping the ball moving. And we. But just that little, like, this is so rare. This hardly ever happens. We're running around. We're so excited. Yeah, that was something that was just really cool when we had like five people, you know, and the other thing, you know, with five people, you communicate faster. Just like you got one person to go to or two people to go to and you get the answers really quick and you. But also, we weren't that. We weren't that busy, you know, we were much, much less. Well, we personally were busy because we were building a business, but we were much less busy on the purchase and sales, if that makes sense.

Yeah, absolutely. It's. It's crazy to think about because I've been here for a year and a half now, and even from when I've started to now, the amount of properties that we're closing, A To B and B2C have excelled so much. And I'm just like. And like you said, it doesn't get old. A lot of times we.

We don't go running for the halls, which I'm sad about, but we all shout bam. We slam a magnet down when we, you know, we get excited. There's little things that we do that we.

Absolutely. It's still very energetic and fun. Even if it's like. If it's even online and like, we do it within slack among just the teammate. Team members. It's still so exciting. Like a bunch of people. There will just be like 10 to 15 emojis like, of excitement.

Like, so it's pumpkin.

Yeah. And it's exciting. It's the same excitement for both ends when we buy a property and sell a property.

Yes.

That leads into the next question on how. How have we changed to accomplish this.

Well, we, you know, we. So in the. In the beginning, we had, you know, like two to four properties were closing a month. Right. And I think last quarter we closed around 30. So drastic changes. And I think the biggest things that have happened is we've just expanded our companies. So we brought on, you know, the acquisition company that you guys have probably heard about, you've probably talked about. You know, we brought them on and their sole focus is to find properties. You know, we've brought on our own rehab team, which when I started, you know, we had Bulldog, but it was really like one person managing, I don't know, one crew or two crews or something. You know, it wasn't anything near what it is right now. Being able to do the volume, to rehab the volume. Property management, having our property management and the strides that they've taken to make our investors happy so that they'll come.

Back and buy more.

And that allows us to, you know, kind of keep. Keep providing good service and good products, and that helps us really ramp up. So I think that's, you know, our biggest thing. And then just continually improving processes, looking at how we're doing what we're doing and doing it better.

Yeah, Erin and I, actually, right before this, we were just talking about processes and going back to what I said. I've only been here for a year and a half. It feels so much longer because of how much we have grown so fast. And it's amazing. I've never been in a position where we have grown so fast and see nothing but positive results from it. And we were talking about processes constantly changing and having to constantly rework the processes like on, like, paper or a word doc or something, because they're just changing. Because we are changing and growing and we're keeping up with the tempo. And it's amazing. It's absolutely. I'd say that to everyone, whether I work with my family, I'm like, guys, like, it's crazy. Actually, yesterday we were looking at the old conference table, which I believe fits, what, six people.

So, like a desk now?

Yeah, yeah. And so I was like. We were talking to Dalton and Daryl, some of our acquisition guys, and I was like, yeah, that was our conference table originally. And they're like, what? I was like, yeah, that was back when we could all actually fit at the conference table. And now we have a much larger conference table. And it was working for a while. Yeah. And now I think we've even outgrown.

That one, which only fit in the training room.

Yeah.

And sometimes we don't even have enough seats in there, I think.

Yeah, it's crazy, and it's an amazing thing to see. Okay, we got a little bit off track there. But going back to talking about title, why is title work so important?

It's very important to get title work and have a good title company that you trust, as well as getting a title policy. Also very important for anybody ever wondering, you should always get one. Title insurance, please get it. We would have lost dramatically a lot of money here recently if we did not get a title policy, so. But having good, clear title work is important because it makes sure that there's no open mortgages, liens on the property, delinquent taxes, liens attached to the seller, who may be Attached to the property as well. And it's. If he sells it, it stays with the property. Yeah. You know, I think we've got a child support lien we're working on, you know, like random things that you wouldn't think about that are attached to. To a property tax. Liens, obviously, foreclosures. We're running into like a tax foreclosure or something. Like any of that stuff that we might not be able to find, they can catch and they can find. Sue has even found things like, you know, hey, this transfer went from this person to this person. But this deed wasn't notarized. Right. Or the. They. They deeded it to themselves. Like that actually happened recently.

I remember about that.

They deeded it to themselves. So they have to deed signed. And. And how many times has that transferred since then? You know, but that's still there. That's still an issue that's on the title. So often people do like a quick claim deed, and if you don't know what that is, it, you could literally write up a deed and you could sell me your house right now. Oh, okay. I don't have to check anything, basically, is how I feel about that. But, you know, those can muddy the waters where sue can kind of look through those and make sure that everything was still done correctly so that we can get a general warranty deed, which is what we then can pass on to our investors that they can have as well with clear title. So hopefully that answers the question. But it's super important because, you know, if any issue pops up, which our title company, I believe they have had one issue in 30 years, and it was with us just recently. So she was very bummed that it was with us. But, you know, somebody had had fraudulently had a deed filed and signed by somebody and a notary notarized it. So that's, you know, it's very. Would have been very, very hard to catch. But we were lucky enough that we got a title policy and we were reinstated our. Our funds in full. And, you know, it could have gone poorly.

Yeah.

If we didn't absolutely.

See, and I'm learning so much from this because initially when I wrote the question on why is title work so.

Important.

I didn't know. But earlier in the conversation when you were talking about making sure the title is clear for the investor, like I said earlier, I never thought about it that way. And so whenever I just asked you this, I was like, well, now I know why. It's because of this and that. But even then you just still provided more information. Like, I didn't know you could basically get insurance on title. I have no clue that. And I'm hopefully going to buy my first house in the spring. So this is important information to know.

Yeah, I've got a title company for you.

Well, thank you. So you kind of started talking about it a little bit with the issue that we ran into recently with the notary and everything. Do you have any other horror stories.

That you want to share? Yeah, I think that this is a future podcast episode that we'll go more in depth on, Right?

Absolutely.

Stories. I can't wait. I'll have to really. I won't have to think that hard because they're always top of mind. But when you did present this question to me, I was. I was thinking, which one can I give that I don't want to give away, you know, the next podcast episode, whenever we do that. But there is one, and I think it's still being worked on now. But the title work came back and I said, you know, is it good? And sue said, well, there are over 50 liens attached to the property.

50.

You heard that, right? Some are valid liens, you know, against, like, we know that they're against the previous people who own the property, which, again, this is like, you know, a quick claim deed from family member to family member to family member. All those family members have, like, hospital liens, medical lien, things like that attached to it. And it just adds up. So there's 50. Some of them are possible, you know, liens. So we might verify, like, a Social Security number or. I'm not quite sure how they do that because that's totally title companies.

Right.

You know, that's their ball game. But they'll verify some things. And, you know, hey, this name doesn't. This. This one's not really theirs. It's somebody else's. So maybe we'll drop those down a little bit still. And, you know, the seller literally said, I'm not going to sell my house to pay off people's liens, which I get. But you should have done title work. Yeah, right. Like, you should have had a title search done. So I think she's still, like, hunting people down and telling them to pay off their liens. She can sell the house. So, yeah, we're still. Apparently, we're still working with her, and maybe somewhere down the road we'll buy this house.

Yeah.

And at that time, it'll be titled Free and Clear.

That's right. That's what we're Hoping. How long have we been. Or she been supposedly working on this?

Months. I don't know exactly when I got the contract sent to me, but I want to say it's been probably. I want to say maybe July. Okay. So, yeah, I feel like this happened right around when I was on vacation because I think I had to figure it out, you know, in a hotel room.

Oh, God.

I help Carla figure out what to do because she was kind of taking over things for me.

Yeah.

And I feel like I remember it being July. So a few months. Definitely not our longest title process. We've had some other ones, but you'll hear about those later.

Yes.

But it's. It's been a while. Oh, gosh.

Yeah. And that I feel like that's.

I have no idea.

A quick process, nor an easy process to do to get people to pay money they may not have known about.

Exactly.

Or maybe didn't know about or didn't care. Yeah.

And thought, well, it's not my problem. Right. Exactly.

Oh, man, that makes me nervous to buy a house. Yeah. We'll see what happens when that happens in spring. All right, well, that's all the questions that I have for you. You kind of already. We have a preview to it. We are definitely going to be having another podcast in the future to talk more about title work, horror stories, which. Those types of podcasts are my favorite ones. I know we have one coming up with our project manager, Steve here soon that is going to be Rehab Nightmares.

And I love those.

I do, too. I'm so excited. So, yeah, definitely be on the lookout for those. Those will be out within the next few weeks. We are available on all major streaming platforms. Podcasts or podcasts, Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google, YouTube and then some. There's other ones as well.

IHeartRadio.

So if you guys have any questions at all or you guys want us to talk about a specific property. Want to hear or specific topic. Want to hear any more? Definitely. Let us know if you. You can email us@podcastsreedomrealestategroup.com and we will be glad to help you on that. Or even if you have questions about real estate investing, we can do that as well. Do you have anything else you want to add?

No, I don't think so.

All right. We always done this. I may not have told you. I think you know it for the vlogs, but.

Yeah, you sprung this on me last time.

Yep. So remember to always invest smart and live happy. All right, thanks, guys. Bye. Nothing on this show should be considered.

Specific personal or professional advice, please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions and information on this show are not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss.