The Title Report recently sat down with Qualia founder and CEO Nate Baker to discuss his thoughts on the future of real estate.
Baker said whatever that future looks like, title agents are at the center of the picture.
“If you buy a house, it’s not the best experience today. And it should be. It should be a nice, simple, easy transaction. But it’s still a mess,” he said.
The title agent is the key to making the entire transaction better, Baker said.
“The title agent had historically been forgotten and underappreciated. It seemed almost like an administrative function to people on the outside but really, they are the core of the transaction,” he said. “What we realized is if you build software for the title agent, if you reinvent their workflow, you’re actually in a position to change how they interact with everyone around them: the buyer, the seller, the real estate agent, the lender, the county. Everyone can have a much better experience.”
The challenge for companies like Qualia is to stay ahead of the curve, anticipating what’s next to keep the title insurance industry current and competitive. The remote offices that became essential during the pandemic raised the bar on the speed of technological advancement, Baker said.
“COVID was a huge tailwind to technology adoption across the world, not just for title software, but for every type of virtual, remote-focused or productivity focused software,” he said. “It used to be the case, even a couple years ago, that the average title company did not adopt modern software. But I think the bar has been raised in a material way, where the average title company is now investing much more in being digital first, being sophisticated with technology, thinking of it as a core part of their DNA, marketing about it, talking about it, thinking about it. That really puts pressure on the industry to say, ‘Well, what’s next? Where can we go to keep raising the bar?’ ”
One of the first places to look is how information is flowing between all the players in a real estate transaction, Baker said.
“The problem that we’ve seen over and over is connectivity between all the different constituents. You end up having a lender who doesn’t know what the title company needs and doesn’t know what the real estate agent is asked, and the consumer just gave that information to the real estate agent and were told by the lender the transaction is going to be delayed but someone else didn't know that, and it becomes a whole mess,” he said. “There’s a big opportunity for software to play a role in bringing everyone on to common systems, or systems that have connectivity with one another.
“It’s basically figuring out how to get the title companies, partners, lenders, real estate agents, buyers and sellers onto a shared platform, so that everyone can communicate more easily and in a streamlined way. That will make the experience dramatically better for the consumer. They’ll have that Amazon checkout experience. It will also make it better for the title company because they won’t have to deal with the chaos that comes out of repeated questions and confusion.”
For any such improvements to be successful, it’s important they work with existing workflows rather than replace them, Baker added.
“A lot of companies that have come into this space in the past and failed have basically put their foot down and said, ‘This is how it will be,’ but our view is that the software exists to complement and magnify people who are already doing these things in the systems that are already in place,” he said. “Rather than going to war with a process, our view is to complement how it's done, make those people better with technology and let them do their job more easily. And over time, you're able to incrementally push them in the right direction to make their workflows better by using the software better. And that lets you tie things together a bit more nicely.”
Baker is confident the industry, working together, can achieve a streamlined, more enjoyable real estate transaction experience.
“It’s so easy to purchase something on Amazon like a book and it just shows up the next morning. There's no reason fundamentally that real estate can't be that simple, that easy,” he said. “We haven't made the same progress on the real estate side. But I think that we will, in the near term. The whole industry together is actually solving a lot of these problems.”