RGS TITLE LLC

unknown

I was a remote seller (in Massachusetts) for this Washington, DC house, so it was important to me that the title company work effectively via email. Tradition Title did do that. They were responsive to incoming email, and they responded by email instead of using outmoded methods like fax and post. Everybody I worked with there was pleasant and intelligent. They were supportive of making it possible for the settlement meeting to be done without my physical presence; for example, they made the settlement paperwork for the closing available to me in advance so I could review it for accuracy. Another strong point: I got the sense of their functioning fairly and honestly for both buyer and seller. The primary reason I would hesitate to work with them again was accuracy. I recognize that I am a more careful, detail-oriented person than average. For example, I do read legal documents before signing them, and it is not uncommon for me to find errors, including significant errors that totally change the meaning, in standard boilerplate documents. My experience with Tradition Title was that I had to correct numerous small errors in various pieces of paperwork (for example, they'd get an address right in one place in the packet, and wrong in other places), but also I had to correct major errors in even the key document, the Title that the buyer was paying for. Not just once, but twice, I had to tell them in writing that they had got the lot number wrong on the title, so that they were having me sell the house next door instead of the house that the trust owned. Eventually, with many drafts back and forth, we got the settlement documents into a condition that made me willing to sign them. We still had one boilerplate sentence that made no sense, and which I could pretty well guess which words had gotten mangled to remove the meaningful protection of this clause for benefit of the buyer, but when my counterpart at Tradition told me I could fix that sentence by crossing it out and writing in the correction, I reached the limit of my willingness to do their work for them. I just signed the document containing the mangled, meaningless sentence. An additional point of friction during this drafting process was that I do not think the person I was working with really understands the level of care that it takes to create a good experience for a client filling out forms remotely. As the most basic example of that, the forms as prepared originally did not consistently deal with the fact that the seller's signatures would be notarized in Boston while the buyer's would be notarized in a different place on a different date by a different notary. I am not sure what the standard of performance is supposed to be for examining titles. Tradition Title did not detect the fact that the 2006 title on the property introduced an error not found in the 1968 title; instead, they copied that introduced error from the 2006 title. On the plus side, they did quite responsively make a nicely phrased correction to that error after I looked a little further back (to the 1968 title) and found the error and brought it to their attention. For the major transaction, Tradition Title was fairly prompt. The settlement was Friday morning and they initiated the wire transfer to the seller on Monday, payment arriving Tuesday. For the small stuff, they were less prompt; after holding back a $300 water escrow to pay a $26 water bill, they had still not paid the bill when I phoned them to follow up three months later. They then responded quickly to my call and got it straightened out.