The success of Rexera customers

The Problem

In 2021, Hankin & Pack experienced a significant growth surge that strained their internal processes. The rapid expansion made sustaining the company’s culture, efficiency, and level of customer communication challenging.
Jordan Edgerton, VP of Closing Operations, identified several challenges the firm faced:

Lack of Scalability

The sudden influx of business necessitated rapid hiring, sometimes at the expense of maintaining high quality and preserving the company culture. The situation was further complicated when the market turned, leading to the difficult decisions the whole real estate industry faced when rates went up.

Jordan reflected on this period:

“In 2021, we experienced our first major growth spurt, expanding at an unprecedented pace. As a relatively young company, we realized that our scalability was not where it needed to be, leading to over-hiring. When the market declined at the end of 2022, like many others in our industry, we faced the difficult task of downsizing—a situation we are committed to avoiding in the future.”

This scaling challenge highlighted the need for a more flexible and scalable operational model that could adapt to market fluctuations without compromising service quality or staff stability.

Inefficient HOA Document Acquisition

The HOA document acquisition process was time-consuming and inconsistent, diverting valuable resources from client communication and complicating training efforts. This inefficiency hindered Hankin & Pack’s ability to deliver the flawless customer experience central to their vision of becoming the most referred law firm.
Jordan emphasized the importance of consistency in this process:

“It helps us from a consistency standpoint, that’s one of our core values. It’s a lot easier to train and onboard people when everything looks the same and everything’s consistent.”

Streamlining this process would free up time for customer communication, improve consistency, and support the firm’s growth and training initiatives.

Finding an Innovative, Adaptable Partner

Hankin & Pack needed a vendor who could keep pace with their innovation and create tailored solutions but struggled to find one.

“We really wanted someone that would be willing to change and be innovative.”

This difficulty in finding a flexible partner was hindering their ability to improve processes efficiently and maintain their competitive edge.
To address these challenges, Hankin & Pack began searching for a partner who could provide innovative solutions tailored to their needs.

The Challenge

There were challenges the company needed to find solutions to. Certain aspects of the settlement process lack centralized infrastructure and still rely on manual processes, with HOA workflows being some of the most labor-intensive and disorganized.

Brooke Eshelman, Proliant’s VP of Operations, was challenged with finding a way to optimize and streamline the HOA and Municipal Lien Search process.

The Hypothesis

The notoriously chaotic processes of handling HOA inquiries and estoppels took a disproportionately long time and detracted from client engagement.

If Brooke managed to consolidate and automate HOA document acquisition, her team would be able to turn their focus back to where it mattered most—customer service.

Earlier this year, Melissa decided to open her family-owned business in Texas, close to home. Driven by her goal to build a company grounded in tradition and family values, she emphasized the importance of personalized customer experiences.

To support those goals, Melissa and the team at Emerald National Title knew the significance of technology to their growth strategy. The company’s CTO was tasked with the discovery and integration of technology that established Emerald National Title as a nimble and flexible business. The company contributes their rapid go to market on their investment in solutions that require low infrastructure investment, are quick to deploy, and are intuitive for the end users.

How Does Technology Help Title and Escrow Teams?

As Melissa shared, the technology of the Emerald National Title team helps them better visualize their customer experience roadmap; it guides the team as they scale the business and fine-tune the relationship with customers.

When Melissa talks to realtors, they want to know how she and her team can help them gain customers and maintain existing relationships. She is quick to respond that the right technology integration creates a seamless experience for their customers.

When handoffs and communication between teams are smooth and organized, the closing process can be the least stressful part of buying a new home. Realtors spend less time on manual tasks and can be more proactive in communicating updates or removing closing roadblocks.

How Can Title & Escrow Companies Offer Exceptional Customer Service?

For Melissa and the Emerald National Title team, the answer is seamless communication and transparency throughout the closing process.

In fact, they are not treating home-buying as a simple transaction but as a well-communicated relationship that offers frequent and detailed updates throughout the process. Making sure home sellers and buyers understand every step of the process and ensuring their peace of mind that the Emerald National Title team has their back.

For this communication to be stress-free and secure, Emerald National Title has been investing in a secure doc portal that ensures a protected exchange of updates, documents, and payments. For them, cyber security is a top priority, especially when dealing with clients’ personal and payment information.

Technology has become a bulletproof way for Melissa and her team to build trust and ensure smooth communication with customers, as well as realtors, mortgage brokers, and lenders.

To exceed everyone’s expectations along with investing in future-proofed technologies, Melissa chooses to partner with vendors who share her business perspective.

The Challenge

When the Title industry talks about HOAs, we usually hear about the tedious manual processes, lots of back-and-forth communications with all parties, and wasted time.

Being on tight deadlines doesn’t help when you need to rely on someone else. TransCounty took a leap of faith and trusted Rexera’s automated process, and here is what came out of this.

The HOA piece was always a problem for TransCounty Title. They would go through a tedious manual process with multiple follow-ups with the seller to obtain all required documents.

“HOAs are the single most dreaded thing about a closing. When you find out the customer has an HOA, you dread the file because of the hassle that you have to work with the seller on.”

Before partnering with Rexera, TransCounty would call or email each customer to gather the HOA contact information. Once they had that, they would contact the HOA on their own to order the documents.

Then they had to reach back out to the client to inform them that they would receive an email with a request to make a payment to the HOA. All these steps were necessary for the HOA to send TransCounty the information.

As expected, this convoluted process presented multiple obstacles. Some clients wouldn’t receive the payment link or the email altogether, and others would be upset that they have to pay for the documents upfront. TransCounty would then have multiple follow-ups to ensure the document fees are paid.

The entire process translated into 3-4 calls to the customers, which created friction in the process and a bitter client experience. In addition, since the team was bogged down having to do so many things on their own, they couldn’t easily
scale their operation.

Nowadays, consumers are used to instantaneous gratification, and they are looking for faster and smoother closings with as little involvement on their part as possible. Many first-time home buyers select their real estate and title companies based on recommendations from people they know.

To get these recommendations, increase their NPS, and grow their business, title companies are looking for ways to provide a better customer experience and faster closings.

The challenge

Endpoint’s mission is to make the real estate closing experience as seamless as possible. Closings are very complex and each one is unique, requiring professional expertise from closing specialists, yet there are opportunities to automate processes to enhance the experience.

Collecting HOA documents and data is one area where automation can improve and accelerate closings. The task of collecting HOA documents and data can be labor-intensive and may take days, depending on the depth of information provided by the seller and the responsiveness of the HOA.

The document and data collection is transaction-specific, which does not align with Endpoint’s goal of standardizing closings and decreasing clear-to-close timelines.

Shawna Hernandez

Chief Operating Officer, Endpoint

We do believe that closing requires professional expertise, but there are opportunities to use technology and automation to enhance the experience.

It is always great when someone has your back in a tedious and stressful process. A great business partner that you can rely on in any situation is crucial for success. Homeward found such a partner in Rexera, and now they can focus on their customers while Rexera takes care of the HOAs.

The challenge

Homeward has a complex business model where there are two closings instead of one. First, Homeward buys the home with cash. Then, the buyer buys it back from Homeward with their mortgage. So there are two contracts, two closings, and two transactions happening very close in time to each other. For Homeward, it created extra friction on top of the usual frustrations of ordering and chasing HOAs for the documents.

Homeward’s production staff was ordering HOA documentation directly either from management companies or smaller HOAs. This left a lot of margin for error when managing the documents, like missed documents or HOAs, late ordering, etc. The team had to order the new documents while keeping in mind updating the existing documents, and staying ahead of the deadlines. If something was missed or delayed on one of the transactions, two transactions were falling through.

They needed a reliable partner to have their back throughout the whole process.

Brad Honn

Senior Director of Escrow and Title Operations at Homeward

“As we all know, HOA issues can really blow up and cause a lot of problems for closing. So it helps us all sleep better knowing that there is not going to be a problem, or anything we forgot on the order, or an update that we forgot to complete before closing the transaction. Because we have a great partner Rexera, making sure that those things don’t happen to us.”