Here are some excerpts from Thomas Pryde’s new Blog pertaining to abstractors.  To read the entire article click: Thomas Pryde Blog

I couldn’t agree more.

Independent Abstractors: Well Trained Specialists (Part Three)

There are certainly opportunities to succeed in this market. If independent service providers are going to take advantage of them, they must differentiate themselves from the rest of the market, and nothing sets the independent apart from the crowd better than the fact that they know abstracting, in the context of their local areas, better than anyone.

However, while this is a distinct advantage, there are two critical obstacles to getting that message out to clients and convincing them to use your services. Once the obstacles are understood, the opportunities and challenges become clearer.

Educate

This is really the point of this article. The message that local expertise results in superior results is not making it to the clients. This may be partially due to a lack of marketing and communication from the independent providers, and/or it may be partially due to the fact that the ultimate clients (consumers and lenders) are frequently insulated from the independent provider that is performing the search.

Even where this is understood there is no way to verify or validate genuine expertise, and therein can be found the biggest challenge. Until there is a broadly accepted education and certification process, there is not likely to be any significant traction gained in regards to the one market value that independent providers can best deliver.

Gains can be made in the other two values, and that will be important. However, very few things would positively impact the market for independent providers better than a robust certification program. Such a program would be good for the market as a whole; it would especially benefit consumers, and independent service providers would have the means to communicate the difference between a discount provider and one with genuine local expertise.

What can be done?

1. Recognize that you are part of a large group of providers that can significantly impact the market, if there is unity.
2. Participate in SOT and other social media venues (Linkdin has several communities as well)
3. Contribute to best practices discussions, in particular, and strive to educate your clients as to why commodity searches are inferior.
4. Join NALTEA or other professional organizations that can provide the structure for increased cooperation and unity.
5. Speak up on behalf of better education practices for training abstractors, and join efforts to codify that effort in a certification process.

There is much work to be done, but without a unified commitment to these things, the opportunities will be eaten away slowly, until the idea of independent search services is a thing of the past.