NALTEA has finalized the date and location of the October 2009 NALTEA Conference!  The event will be held October 9-11 at the Omni Hotel, downtown Charlotte, North Carolina.

A limited number of rooms have been blocked off at a really great rate of $89 for a single or double. In order to keep the conference very affordable,  NALTEA is offering significant discounts for those who register early: Register before August 16th and receive $50 off ($100 registration fee for members/$125 for non-members*)

Register between August 17th and September 16th and receive $25 off ($125 registration fee/$150 for non-members) After September 16th, the full conference fee is required of $150 for members/$175 for non-members. Non-members can apply the additional $25 fee to their NALTEA membership when they join at the conference.

The conference will include breakfasts, lunch on Saturday, industry speakers, an opportunity to take the NALTEA National Certified Abstractor exam (with the NCA designation) and participate in a pre-test prep class with Jeanine W. (Jeanne) Johnson.  Each of Jeanne’s review and training classes are valued at over $200, and she’s providing our members the opportunity to take the instructor training and student test-prep classes at no extra charge! If you want to sit for the exam this October, sign up for Jeanne’s test-prep class.  If you’ve ever thought you might want to become an instructor, qualified Certified and Master Abstractors can also sit for the Train-the-Trainer class to become qualified NALTEA instructors.

Registration will be available soon via the NALTEA website.  We will notify you by email when the website is ready to accept conference registration.  In the meantime, reserve the dates on your calendar and start looking for the best flight deals to Charlotte!  Registration for the great $89 room rate at the Omni will be through the hotel website and must be made prior to September 16th or while rooms remain available.

Kudos to the American Land Title Association (ALTA) and Old Republic Title, who hosted a “A Day in the Life of a Title Insurer” for NAIC’s Title Working Group. ALTA Agents’ Chair Anne Anastasi led the meeting, during the quarterly meeting of the NAIC in Minneapolis, where regulators spent an hour and a half learning about title insurance claims, searches, exams, commitment preparation, clearing title, curative work, etc.

The meeting was designed both to facilitate an ongoing relationship with regulators, and to assist NAIC’s Title Working Group as they labor through survey questions for state insurance regulators to evaluate whether a national data collection plan can be implemented to give regulators a better idea of agent and underwriter expenses.

In this author’s opinion, title insurance clearly belongs under the auspices of each state’s regulators, as title issues vary too much state to state to be governed under a national regulator.

Title Insurance continues to be characterized as a scam, even for attorneys who issue title policies. Once again, the media (this time a  Huffington Post article) gives a bad rap to the title industry as just another get-rich-quick-and-scam-the-consumer product. The author has clearly buried his lack of expertise in a convoluted oxymoron concept he calls the “fraud of honest service.” I read this as saying, while title insurance is technically legal, the product is bogus and it’s really all just about a big kick-back.

If you’ve ever purchased a house or a condo, your closing attorney urges (if it’s an all-cash deal) and the lender requires that you buy something expensive called title insurance, which essentially covers your attorney’s liability in case he erred in conducting the title search. But what no one knows is that the title insurance company, whom your attorney has hired, kicks back a large undisclosed referral fee to your attorney. (In a sense, you unwittingly pay your attorney’s fee twice.) Although it’s all perfectly legal, it would also appear to be a blatant example of private honest-services fraud, for which no closing attorney has ever been charged.

What do legitimate title professionals have to DO to explain our product and services? To show there is value and the product is important to the consumer. Obviously the title industry is just not doing enough to get the message out. Will there be a demise to the industry as we know it, because of the flippant and erroneous attitude toward title insurers? And what are YOU going to do about it? Look in the Mirror, it’s up to us.