In March, the American Land Title Association (ALTA) Board of Governors voted to create a Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) Advisory Council, made up of members who helped develop initiatives at their organizations.
Although other ALTA groups address DEI issues, like the DEI subcommittees of the Talent Committee and the Membership Committee and the Discriminatory Covenants Work Group, ALTA President Dan Wold said it was time to create a group solely dedicated to DEI.
“While the strides made by each group are important, and should continue moving forward, we feel it is time to join leaders of these groups to share information and reduce overlap of efforts and have one group that reports to the board of governors,” Wold said. “As an industry that values homeownership and fair housing for all, we’re dedicated to taking meaningful action that benefits professionals in the industry and our communities.”
The membership of the DEI Advisory Council includes Deborah Bailey, Bailey Helms Legal; Mark Bennett, Ohio Land Title Association; Michelle Glonek, First American Title; Dione Joseph OLTP, Title First Agency, a division of Stewart Title family of companies; Mike Montalvo, Fort Dearborn Land Title; Elizabeth Reilly, Fidelity National Financial; David Scott, Old Republic, and Elizabeth Wysong, FNF Family of Companies.
The Title Report sat down with three members to discuss the new council and why DEI efforts are critical to the future of the title industry.
David Scott
Scott, senior vice president, manager national agency services with Old Republic, also is a member ALTA’s Membership Committee’s DEI subcommittee, which he helped create. He sees a goal of the DEI Advisory Committee as increasing participation in the title space by groups who have not been well represented in the past.
“More specifically, our goals could be broken down in to three parts, really. One: to share with existing companies how the benefits of an empowered diverse workforce, assisting with the operations and management of a company, can contribute to a company’s success,” he said. “Two: We also hope to inform people with diverse backgrounds, who know nothing about the title industry, that we exist, and that there are career opportunities here. And three: we want to identify tools and provide resources to assist companies interested in creating DEI programs if they don’t currently have one in place. If we are successful on any one of these endeavors, our group would be happy.”
One of the ways Scott hopes the DEI Advisory Group can gauge overall DEI initiative participation in the industry is by a survey recently set out by the membership subcommittee.
“Among other things, we wanted to find out who currently hosts DEI programs or have any interest in the subject,” he said. “We are just now getting results back from a survey we recently sent out to ALTA members. Once we review those results, we can more accurately focus our efforts.”
Scott, who is Black, has been acutely aware of diversity and inclusion challenges in the industry since he was in law school.
“I volunteered to work with a non-profit group that was dedicated to exposing housing discrimination in different Denver real estate markets. Honestly, I was naïve and did not believe there was any discrimination going on in Denver,” he recalls. “I was shocked at the things we encountered. Time and time again, our Black or Hispanic testers (people that would pose as buyers) who possessed superior credentials were consistently steered to neighborhoods that were less desirable and away from the neighborhoods they were interested in. Our caucasian testers purposely presented less than stellar credentials and were eagerly encouraged to purchase homes in these targeted, suspect communities, time and time again. That bothered me a lot and sparked my early interest in DEI, long before it was referred to as DEI.”
As the demographics of homeownership have changed, so have the demographics of real estate and lending professionals, Scott said. There should be, and are, similar changes happening in the title space.
“My general observation over the years is that there have, indeed, been some changes in the overall makeup of our workforce, but there is still room to grow leadership, management and ownership roles within our industry from certain groups,” he said. “Having been in sales and sales management for more than 30 years, I have called upon hundreds of title insurance agents. Our industry has made great strides, but our industry could benefit further from increased diversity in ownership, management, and an increased diversity in our workforce.”
Dione Joseph
Title First Agency Commercial Underwriter Joseph, who is also the immediate past president and current board member of the Ohio Land Title Association (OLTA), said she is ready to share some of her practical experience in creating DEI initiatives.
She was able to put some of her concepts into practice at Title First Agency and is grateful that President Sean Stoner supported her vision. “He allowed me to present my ideas and really listened and gave me feedback,” she said.
The agency launched a spirit committee, which focuses on charitable outreach activities like organizing drives for families in need and “adopting” families for the holidays.
“If you consider the dimensions of diversity, you may immediately go to things like race, ethnicity, gender, age, religion, disability, sexual orientation, but just as important is social class, national origin, education, political beliefs, skillsets and experience,” Joseph said. “If we see beyond the visible, what I feel is diversity is the equal recognition and celebration of the specialness and uniqueness that is a human. At the end of the day, that includes everyone.”
She helped OLTA form a task force and then a DEI committee, one of the first land title associations to do so. The decision to create the task force came when she was OLTA president and was contacted by an association member.
“She called me, and in that conversation, she said, and I quote, ‘Dione, given George Floyd and the state of race relations in our country, what is OLTA doing with diversity?’ Exactly verbatim. I will never forget that,” Joseph said. “As a woman of color living in the United States who comes from an immigrant background, these are things that my life touches every day. I always said when a member comes to a president and asks for something, you should really stop and think about it, because that’s not just one member; they’re talking about it behind the scenes.”
She went to OLTA Executive Director Mark Bennett, who also is a member of the ALTA DEI Advisory Council, to discuss options.
“The brilliance about Mark, in my opinion, is that he is forward seeking and he attends so many seminars, he’s on the pulse of the organizations,” she said. “He told me that he had been thinking prior to me bringing this to him on an education segment about DEI.”
They developed a two-point strategy. First, Joseph moderated a DEI educational panel at the 2021 OLTA convention. The OLTA board also unanimously voted to create a task force to examine forming a DEI committee. Under the new president, the board unanimously voted to create the committee.
Joseph is the board liaison to the committee, and the member who initially approached Joseph asking about diversity initiatives is also on the committee.
One of the biggest misconceptions she hears about DEI initiatives is that there is no way to measure whether they are having an impact, she said.
“First, you've got to literally know what your strategies are, and then what your programming is, and then you look at whether the programming is touching your people, is really doing what it was set to do,” Joseph said. “And you have to have really clear goals and only do programs that relate to your goals. Then you can, in fact, measure whether or not your employees are engaging the way in which you intend. Do they know about the programs you’ve put out? Are they engaging in it? I mean, if you’ve spent millions of dollars putting out a program and you have less than 30 percent engaged, you’ve got a problem.”
As far as her participation in the ALTA DEI Advisory Counsel, Joseph has a simple goal: “Action, action, action.”
That includes both immediate actions and long-term actions, she said. “Committees that are not engaging are often those who stay in those long-term actions too much. And then there are others that are all about short term, and they have no realized long-term goals. You need both happening at the same time structurally,” she said.
Michael Montalvo
Fort Dearborn Land Title Co. Vice President Montalvo, who has been in the title industry for 30 years, said he is glad to see DEI efforts getting more attention, as it’s long overdue.
“I think that as a whole, you’re seeing a whole changeover in business in shareholders’ requests in what they are looking for, and they are looking for more responsible companies to invest in,” he said. “You’re seeing those investors and those stock buyers want to see environmental issues, the DEI issues, being addressed more holistically.”
He said it’s critical that such initiatives include minorities, like himself. He is Hispanic.
“The biggest problem that I foresee is that if you think of people who all have kind of similar views and similar upbringings, I don’t think they’ve always seen the other side of things in the inclusion issues and the equality issues,” he said. “I’ve had conversations with people who think they are thinking correctly, but they don’t necessarily understand what this is about. It’s easy and simple to say, ‘It’s DEI. It’s diversity and inclusion and equity,’ but what does that really mean? I think that’s really part of where we are trying to get.
“I don’t know how people who have never felt racism or felt excluded on the basis of race could understand and create a platform and a direction of what they want to accomplish,” Montalvo said. “I appreciate the efforts, don’t get me wrong, but I think you have to have that voice that has dealt with some of those issues and understands where it comes from and what are we doing in the industry to change that over.”
When he goes to industry events and gatherings, Montalvo said, he specifically looks for under-represented individuals to speak with, to be more inclusive.
“I want to see some change, and I don’t just want to talk about it,” he said. “Imagine going to somewhere where you were the only person like you. When I go to an ALTA event, it’s probably 5 percent minority. For me, personally, it’s the world I’ve lived in, but some people don’t and don’t have that comfortability level. And when you’re different, how many people are coming to make you feel included? How many people are starting conversations with you? How many people are going out of their way to meet people different than them? Not a lot of people. Whenever I see somebody new or by themselves, I am going to go talk with them.”
For title companies interested in addressing DEI, the first step is to make sure your team is diverse, Montalvo said.
“The first thing you have to do is look at your company. Are you diverse at all?” he asked. “You have to look internally at your makeup of your company before you decide to do anything.”
Minorities need to be in on any conversation a company has about DEI, Montalvo said.
“You have to have diversity to be able to have those conversations, because what you think is a problem with something you’ve never experienced is hard to define and explain and think about,” he said.
Company leadership also needs to ask themselves a hard question about why it is addressing DEI.
“Are you doing it because you have to, or it looks good? Or are you doing it because you want to be socially responsible?” he asked.