| Spotting and seizing worthwhile opportunities
K nowing when to jump into the game- and when to exit it - has buoyed the career of many successful business executives. Sometimes, a good sense of timing is the best business plan.
 For Bart Patterson, CEO of Clear Title Agency of Arizona, identifying needs within the marketplace and then finding efficient ways to meet them has led to a notable career in the title industry.
“It’s really about service to the customer,” Bart, 48, says. “The culture we’ve been able to build here, the manner in which we treat each other, how we treat our people, the respect and the empathy we carry forward each and every day has everything to do with the satisfaction level of the customers.”
Phoenix-based Clear Title provides full-service residential and commercial title and escrow services with locations in Apache Junction, Arrowhead, Gilbert, Mesa, Phoenix, Scottsdale, Chandler, and Flagstaff. The company has been recognized by Inc. as one of the 5000 fastest growing companies and ranks in the top one percent of all First American agents nationally.
However, Bart’s road to Clear Title was not fast or without significant challenges.
After earning a degree from the University of Arizona in 1995, Bart joined ProLink, Inc., an engineering firm in Chandler, Ariz. focused on global positioning system applications. He helped the firm initiate nationwide distribution of the product and assisted in its fundraising efforts.
In 2001, he decided to start his own company, in an industry he knew next to nothing about.
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“We have done it one brick at a time. One customer at a time. One transaction at a time. And really trying to bring about the very best levels of service we can.”
Bart Patterson
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“I thought I knew a lot more than I did about business. And I wanted to go out and see if I could pave my own path,” Bart recalls. “I had a family member who had introduced the idea of building title plants and automating access to real estate information.”
“What I learned at the time was that data from small markets was maybe one percent of the revenue for the large title insurance/data companies, but it was 15 or 20 percent of their problems,” he says. “And they were running into a giant black hole in small markets where they just didn’t have any access to information. And they had a lot of difficulty getting it.”
He created CourthouseData, based in Fayetteville, Ark. It provided real estate information, title plant, and title research services to more than 150 customers in 35 states.
“It was a big leap of faith,” Bart points out. “It was quite an education, to say the least. It was very formulative for me in the sense that I didn’t know anything about the title industry. Certainly, didn’t know anything about the settlement business and escrow. We were lucky to be able to sell it. It was very expensive to build those title plants. Trying to monetize them was far more difficult than we thought it was going to be.”
In 2005, Bart sold CourthouseData to DataTrace, a subsidiary of First American Corp.
While Bart was still fulfilling obligations to the acquirers of his business, a new opportunity knocked at his door.
“I got approached by a family I had known from Arizona who owned a large community bank [First National Bank of Arizona],” he remembers. “They asked me to partner with them and build [a title agency].”
What Bart had no way of knowing was that First National would become the largest bank failure in the history of Arizona.
“As a result, it left us in a tough spot in 2008 with a failed strategic partner,” he recalls. “Those years were the toughest by far.”
So, what did Bart do minus his large, strategic partner? He stayed the course and continued to build a title agency, one customer at a time.
“We have done this very much the old-fashioned way,” he points out. “We’re not out buying business. We have done it one brick at a time. One customer at a time. One transaction at a time. And really trying to bring about the very best levels of service we can.”
Bart says out of the top 20 title companies in the Phoenix market, Clear Title is the only title company that has increased its market share in the past year. This speaks volumes about his commitment to service to the customer.
“Even in the midst of a pandemic, and record volumes, all the craziness, we just are holding steady to those behaviors, those values, the things that have gotten us here,” Bart says. “We answer our phones. We’re responsive. We do what we say we’re going to do. We’re honest about facing up to problems and mistakes. There’s not a great deal of secret sauce in it.”
Along every step of the way, Bart has sought to apply technology to improve the closing process.
“I come to this industry with a very different perspective. The industry is a laggard in the world of technology. There’s not much that we’re doing that is revolutionary,” he says. “It was very apparent to me early on that every piece of technology I could find was focused on the file. All I could tell you was about the file. Couldn’t tell you a thing about the customer. That to me was a wide-open opportunity.”
A father of three young children, Bart is an avid outdoorsman who enjoys cycling, hiking, skiing, and golf.
“I’ve always been very active in that sense. These days, most of my free time is spent with my children,” he says. “There’s nothing better than that.”
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