Themes that have consistently stayed in the headlines the past year
are agent vetting and verification and regaining customer confidence. In
an attempt to address the issues, one of the larger national
underwriters launched a new program to communicate the competency of its
agency base to customers. Stewart Title Guaranty Co. announced the
Stewart Trusted Provider Program to provide lenders, Realtors, builders,
investors and consumers peace of mind in the real estate services
rendered by approved Stewart agencies.
“The idea came from
agencies,” said George Houghton, group president of agency operations
for Stewart, in an interview with The Title Report. “With the emergence
of the third-party vetting companies in 2012, as I traveled the country
and talked to agencies, what I kept hearing was, ‘what is my underwriter
going to do to help me in this environment?’”
It’s key to note
up-front that this program isn’t an additional hurdle for agents to jump
or a special designation to achieve within the Stewart agency base.
Stewart believes its agency network already meets high standards, are
vetted properly in order to write policies for Stewart and this Trusted
Provider Program is a way to brand that fact and provide transparency
into Stewart’s vetting and ongoing monitoring process.
In The Title Report’s April 8 cover feature
about the national agent database concept, it was noted that lenders
are looking for assurances as to who the settlement agent is on the end
of the transaction. The assurances, very broadly, can be broken down two
ways:
1) Is this a valid agency of this underwriter?
2) If yes, then what defines ‘valid’ for this underwriter? What went into that ‘yes’?
Stewart
visited national lenders last fall to discuss their processes and their
vetting and verification program (which we detailed in the Nov. 12, 2012, edition of The Title Report)
to generally build that confidence. Those meetings and the questions
from agencies led the company to the Trusted Provider Program. By adding
a layer of transparency into specifically what their agent
vetting/monitoring processes are, Stewart hopes to provide a window that
will assist inquiring lenders and regulators.