VANTAGE POINT TITLE
Building Relationships & Doing Good Business
By Carole VanSickle Ellis
At Vantage Point Title, Inc. (VPT), everything is about execution. However, there is a caveat that comes with a national title, escrow, and default-services provider that has, as senior co-president David Silcott proudly explained, “the experience that allows VPT to do the deals that other companies either choose not to or are not able to take on.” Silcott explained, “We have so many clients who will literally say, ‘I have some deals my other title company cannot do,’” and VPT nearly always is able to take on these challenges and close them. “The caveat,” Silcott said, “is that we fix them properly, and then we close them.”
Vantage Point’s leadership team, most of which has been working together in the industry since 2000 (years before the company’s founding in 2008), prides itself on an intense work ethic, determined innovation, and a willingness to go above and beyond. This creates a particular determination to constantly identify new ways to eliminate sources of potential errors and improve efficiency.
“We do not talk about how we can’t get a deal done; we talk about how we can,” said Shelley Hickson, vice president of national sales.
The group recalled a recent triumph in which they had to track down an original owner on a commercial property associated with a business that had been dissolved, causing ownership of the property to revert to the individual who had sold it in 2001. “We had to track the owner down (after determining he was still alive) and he had to sign a brand new deed,” said Mark Geiger, senior vice president at the company. “The current ‘owner’ had apparently tried to sell the property last year and failed because the title company in that deal was not able to handle the legwork,” Geiger added. VPT closed the deal mid-June 2022.
“We tell our clients over and over that we are partners with them,” said Silcott. “First and foremost, as a business, we partner with our clients, and that means it is our job to help them get through the difficult and even nasty files so they can close successful transactions.”
One-Point-of-Contact Customer Service
Paul Sobina, VPT’s REO & purchase manager, helps manage the company’s national purchase team. He said the key to Vantage Point’s successful track record is its team, which includes “processors, closers, warehousers, everything you need to close all sorts of transactions from retail purchases and refinances to REO purchases to commercial deals and even cannabis-related deals.”
That team, while vast and varied, uses a variety of strategies to keep things simple and seamless for clients. The most apparent of these strategies may be found in VPT’s one-point-of-contact customer service, which helps prevent confusion while keeping clients fully informed about their transactions.
Typically, a full-service title and escrow company will require customers work around the internal structure of the business in order to take advantage of a variety of services. Vantage Point’s title services take clients from the beginning to the end of a transaction, which can get complicated when a company uses a “traditional” format that passes the customer through multiple divisions within the business. This is where the one-point-of-contact model comes in, supported by the company’s client portal.
“Everything we do internally shows up on our client portal, so clients can see where the title is in the process and when it is done,” Silcott explained. Vantage Point uses the ResWare platform, a workflow automation platform designed to create transparency between companies and customers in the title and escrow industry. Silcott said VPT has developed a custom workflow and automation process that maximizes that transparency, explaining, “Our clients log into the portal [and] they are able to see exactly where things are at present. They can track, balance, and run reports on what is coming up to close.”
For the Vantage Point team, transparency and one-point customer service is just the beginning. The company is also expanding beyond the portal and into robotic systems. “The portal helps with a lot of different aspects of the business, but at the end of the day it is just a tool,” said Silcott. “Our technology goes way beyond that.”
Silcott was referring to Vantage Point’s robotic process automation (RPA), which utilizes a proprietary system of bots working within the ResWare system to manage, balance, and maintain client files and portfolios. The advantages are twofold: Computers make far fewer errors than humans working on this type of data entry and analysis, and the system frees up Vantage Point’s employees to keep close to customers and be fully customer-facing, as Silcott describes it.
“RPAs do not replace people. They enable us to be customer-service focused, and they are hundreds of times more accurate than humans,” he said.
Of course, at Vantage Point, the hours of operation have never been conventional for humans, either. Since the founding of the company, the team has prioritized a “we work when you work” policy that provides live contact 18 hours of every 24, dedicated IT on-site and available 24/7, and extremely flexible scheduling when it comes to getting documents notarized and closings done.
“It comes from our shared experience in the industry in the early 2000s,” Geiger said. “If a client really needs to close a deal at 10:30 at night, we will find someone to close it.”
Silcott chimed in, “Our mentality is always to get the deals closed whatever it takes. It is our passion, and we do not have internal rules about what time of day we schedule closings.”
In the Partnership for the Long Haul
When Vantage Point leaders and employees talk about their clients, you soon notice that they seem to be talking about partners rather than customers. That mindset has led to some extremely long-lived business relationships and strong ties between Vantage Point and the businesses with which it works.
“It is so fun to see our clients in person because we can all kind of laugh together and say, ‘Oh my gosh, remember when?’” said Hickson, referring to the fact that many of the company’s clients have been with VPT for nearly a decade, and several have remained with the company since its founding. “They are dedicated to us as much as we are dedicated to them because their success is our success.” In fact, Vantage Point’s biggest client has been with the company since just after its inception in 2008, and the company’s 15 largest clients have all been with the company for more than eight years.
The partnership mentality paired with cutting-edge technology served the company well during the early years of the COVID-19 global pandemic, during which the processes that already were streamlining the title process at Vantage Point enabled them to take on clients quickly while competitors struggled to adapt to remote processes. “We were prepared to grow,” Silcott said. “We did not turn business away, and we got every deal done while other underwriters and title companies were turning away work.”
“It is very gratifying to see our clients grow and to grow with them,” he added. “Thanks to our technology and our close relationships in these partnerships, we are able to drive that growth and success forward even more.”
SIDEBAR 1
The Basics of Robot Process Automation
When David Silcott says Vantage Point Title, Inc., (VPT)’s robotic process automation (RPA) makes the company more customer-focused, the statement seems hard to digest at first. After all, in 2019, the Brookings Institution released a report warning that a full quarter of American jobs are “at a high risk of automation.”
However, Silcott said “we found that about 80% of the payoff process, for example, can be handled by the RPA process, and that frees up our people to answer our customers’ phone calls and enables our service obsession.”
RPA is the software technology behind software robots, sometimes called “bots,” that can, to a degree, imitate human interactions on digital systems and software. RPA systems have been shown in multiple studies to increase accuracy (57%) and improve compliance in multiple industries (92%). In fact, RPA systems played a crucial role in the scaling of COVID-19 testing early in the global pandemic.
VPT has dedicated itself to leveraging RPA abilities whenever possible in order to stick to the commitment the founders made to themselves and their original clients more than a decade ago. “Our mentality is to get the deals closed,” Silcott concluded. “If that means we do it at 10:30 at night, we do it.” And the RPA systems support the human-power that gets those deals done.
SIDEBAR 2
One Point of Contact, 8 Specialty Services
Vantage Point Title, Inc., makes a point of working with each client in a way that maintains continuity and transparency throughout the closing process. However, that continuity, unusual in the industry, does not prevent the company from offering eight distinct services for customers seeking assistance across the title industry spectrum. Those services include:
Residential transactions
The company focuses on each transaction individually, and handles purchase, refinance, cash deals, and reverse mortgage transactions. “Our goal is to create a seamless transaction, and this particular area makes up the primary amount of our business,” noted Shelley Hickson, vice president of national sales.
Default services
VPT maintains a dedicated team that specializes in handling deed-in-lieu, short sale, pre-foreclosure, and REO deals.
Title only
For clients who like to do some of the legwork themselves, VPT offers a “title only” service delivering title commitment, tax certification, and a preliminary HUD. There are some variations on this service depending on the state.
Commercial
VPT offers commercial clients what the company has dubbed a “commercial advantage,” which gains those clients a dedicated, “one-point-of-contact” team, online order placement, online file tracking of notes and status, centralized closings, and general process management.
Lender/broker
Mortgage lenders and brokers also work with Vantage Point thanks to the company’s national centralized operations. “We have the ability to handle all aspects of the transaction with consistency,” explained Hickson. “Our ability to provide national coverage and manage customers’ expectations makes the process seamless.”
Realtor
Realtors receive similar services to those offered to brokers and lenders and can take advantage of the “small, hometown feel” of the service while relying on VPT’s national underwriting.
Special projects
The Vantage Point Special Projects Division works with VPT partners to develop new products, processes, and technologies. Specialized solutions can cover any area, from compliance to title defect resolution to policy replacement to warehouse products.
Signing and scheduling
Thanks to VPT’s “We work when you work” approach to business, the company offers closings for which the customer chooses location and time. On its website, VPT emphasizes, “WHEREVER it is convenient. WHENEVER it is convenient to your Borrower.”
Learn more about Vantage Point Title, Inc. at VantagePointTitle.com
SIDEBAR 3
Leading the Pack in Compliance & Cybersecurity
If you ever have wondered about the worst thing that could happen if you work with a title and escrow company that is weak on compliance and security, look no farther than the southeastern United States in 2022, where title fraud has resulted in the theft and attempted theft of hundreds of second homes, vacation homes, and rental homes since the start of this year. This type of issue is not restricted to the title and closing industry, of course, nor is it restricted to the southeast. What is more interesting, however, is that although individual fraud incidents make the headlines, most title issues are far more innocent in origin but create hugely problematic issues for homeowners, including loss of identity and personal credit.
Mark Geiger, senior vice president at VPT, recalled one complicated transaction in which the owner of a property, a corporation, had been defunct when it purchased a property decades prior. Because the corporation was nonexistent when it was used to buy the property, the title of the property had reverted back to the prior owner, although no one realized this until the individual who had purchased the property from the defunct company attempted to sell. VPT’s team was able to track down the owner, who believed he had not owned the property since the 1980s. They executed a new deed so that the current “owner,” who did not have clear title, would be able to sell.
“The beauty of our company is that our underwriters are so determined to make the right thing happen,” David Silcott, senior co-president at VPT, said. “That is where we shine as a team, but we also are constantly training our team to deal with things that are outside of their control. We maintain ongoing training to help our team deal with things like fraud and cybersecurity issues.” Silcott detailed the elaborate lengths to which the company has gone to help employees identify and avoid fraud via phishing and malware, noting that not only does Vantage Point have the most robust cybersecurity measures available on the market today but that it also employs a series of random, unannounced testing events to make sure employees are not opening suspicious emails or clicking problematic links. “It is an ongoing thing,” he concluded.
Another constant is the company’s dedication to keeping data redundant so that in the event of a cyber-attack or other digital event, things would keep moving without a hiccup for clients. Vantage Point maintains a secured facility for data with cloud- and data-center redundancy.
“We have invested millions of dollars in backups, security, and recovery in order to maintain business continuity,” Silcott said. “Our disaster recovery plans are robust and built to work. We know because we test them regularly.”
Vantage Point Title Certifications & Practices
» SSAE 18 Certification
» ALTA Best Practices
» Network and Security Penetration Tests
» Disaster and Business Continuity Plans
