Client-Centered Title

Our Guest: Paul Yurashevich

Join us Wednesday to learn all the outstanding benefits of working with Verus Title with Founder & CEO Paul Yurashevich. Understand how you can improve the closing process and provide your customers a fantastic home purchase experience.

Wednesday, July 21 @ 1:30 Central Time.

Show Transcript:

0:00:00.2 Geoffrey Stertz: Hello, and thanks again for joining us for another Fathom Live, a livestream show dedicated to giving you tips and insights from experts in and around the real estate industry. I’m your host, Geoffrey Stertz, I’m so glad to be with you today. And we have with us today, Paul Yurashevich. And I practice that name, and I’m glad that Paul… You are with us here today, so welcome.

0:00:24.4 Paul Yurashevich: Thank you, it’s nice to be here.

0:00:24.7 GS: And you’re hailing from North Carolina, the Cary Area. And Paul is the… Well, there it is, right on the screen, the Verus Title CEO and Founder. So we’re glad to have you here today. And just a little bit about Paul. So Paul, you like to travel, I understand.

0:00:47.8 PY: Correct, yes. I’ve been to over 60 countries and seven continents. But, my favorite…

0:00:56.1 GS: Wow. And what… Yeah, I was gonna say, what’s your favorite country?

0:01:01.9 PY: Well, I’ll go with places, not countries necessarily.

0:01:04.6 GS: Okay.

0:01:05.4 PY: So my two favorite places, one is North Carolina Mountains, I go to Asheville any weekend I can get away. And in terms of countries it’s Portugal, just got back from there a few days ago. So, those are my two favorite…

0:01:18.2 GS: Wow. So you get to live right near your favorite place, and then… Of all the places you’ve gone, your favorite place is right in your backyard, which is cool. And have you met any interesting people along the way?

0:01:31.4 PY: Not necessarily on the trip, probably the most famous person I met is Maria Sharapova, the tennis player, and then Dean Wells.

0:01:39.0 GS: I was just gonna ask people… I was ignorant when you said the name the first time, like, “Okay, I’ve heard the name, but I don’t know who it is.” And I was gonna ask our guests if they knew who Maria Sharapova was. So… But yeah, very cool. So the number one tennis player in the world several times over?

0:01:54.9 PY: Pretty much yeah, yeah. I even have a picture with her, really nice picture [chuckle], it’s good times.

0:02:03.2 GS: Awesome. Very fun. Well, we’re gonna jump into questions here in just a second, but I did wanna let our guests know about… Our viewers know about GoSocial Agent, If you guys haven’t checked it out, GoSocial Agent offers effective and affordable social media marketing solutions to help agents grow their business. They’ll do everything, they’ll help you get your account set up, they will post articles and different things for you to kinda keep you a top of mind for your social media audience, and so make sure you check ’em out. And as a Fathom agent, if you are a Fathom agent, you get some of that stuff for free, which is kind of cool, so you can check ’em out at gosocialagent.com here. And you’ll have to forgive me viewers, because normally, I have Josh Crane helping me mix the show here, but I’m on my own today because there’s sickness in my house where we’re doing this, and so you’ll have to… You’ll have to be patient with me. So kinda jumping in then, your background hasn’t always been in title, what is your background and how has that played into you being the Founder and CEO of Verus?

0:03:06.3 PY: So my background comes from launching financial products for consumers, I was a vice president of Product Management at a big investment company called PIMCO, as well as from a technology start-up background. So that is the lens through which I’m viewing the title industry. But ultimately we sell a consumer product here, the closing experience. Therefore, we need to be accessible, we need to be consumer-centric, and we need to use technology in a wise way, whenever it helps to provide better customer experience.

0:03:40.0 GS: So technology fed you… Kinda led you into the title industry, and I wanna ask you in just a moment about what you found was lacking that technology kind of filled? But first, I forgot to remind you all, if you comment on the show, whether that’s on Facebook or YouTube, you automatically get entered into a drawing, and our winner from our last show that we drew was Yvette Ruiz, and Yvette I think has won either twice, but if not once. I know she’s won once, but she might have won twice, so she’s a faithful viewer. She comments on the show and she wins, so she wins this, and we’re gonna have this again, it’s a nice Ogio messenger bag, so it’s pretty snappy. And so we’re gonna send this to you in the mail, Yvette. And so get to commenting, if we use your comments in the show, they are more likely to be used. You have a higher likelihood of being drawn as well, so… Yeah, so as it relates to that kind of gap that you were trying to fill, what was it that you were hoping technology would fill in the title sphere?

0:04:54.0 PY: So I looked at it from two different ways, one is, what is the business opportunity? How can we do things differently? And from a business opportunity perspective, we saw that many title companies are ultimately local businesses, and they don’t have the full suite of offering for clients that wanna have a more broader geographic reach. So those are investors or lenders who operate in multiple states, so that’s one opportunity we saw. But for your typical home buyer that only buys one house every five or 10 years, that doesn’t really matter. So there what we see is, and what they carry is, an easy streamlined process for buying a home. It should be… Buying a home should be no different from getting your loan online, a lot of lenders are very streamlined around that, you can do the whole this and that in a couple of minutes or even ordering a consumer product from one of the online retailers, very convenient, very intuitive. And many title companies really do not have that focus in their process, and that’s sort of the niche that we are filling in the marketplace right now.

0:06:08.0 GS: So… And you’ll have to excuse me, audience again, I’m dealing with a cough here and [0:06:11.7] ____ Power Paul, he’s probably hearing it in the Skype conversation, but I’m muting it for every one of our viewers here, so I’ve been fighting through some sickness, but… As far as that kind of streamlined process, are we talking about communication? What kind of elements that are very helpful to clients when it comes to title?

0:06:33.1 PY: Yeah, and I just wanna say that, clients, home buyers, and agents, have a lot of title companies to choose from. And we understand that [0:06:48.4] ____ accessibility, deep [0:06:52.2] ____ underwrite expertise and above all we’ll be there for your client in terms of timely communications, easy to understand process and continuous touch points throughout that process. So the client is not left alone, there’s nothing missing in that during that time.

0:07:07.7 GS: Gotcha. So maybe kind of expand on that too. Like you said, there’s a lot of companies out there, so what is Verus… For both the Fathom agent or if you’re watching, and you’re not a Fathom agent, what is Verus really doing for them that other companies aren’t or maybe that you guys kind of in a unique package do?

0:07:29.4 PY: So we bring it all together. So it’s technology when you need it. So sometimes over reliance on technology can be unhelpful if clients feel like they’re starting to lose that personal connection with the person, with the expert that they’re working with. So it’s using technology in a wise way and just having the best expertise in the house that not every title company has.

0:07:57.1 GS: Gotcha. And then how many states at this point does Verus operate in?

0:08:02.6 PY: So we are in over 20 states and continue to add additional ones.

0:08:07.0 GS: Awesome, very cool. And you’re not just coming into this business with an expertise in technology, you yourself have handled transactions, thousands of transactions within the title business. So kinda shifting gears then, what are some of the biggest headaches, maybe from the title standpoint or the things that agents often overlook that cause issues when it comes to trying to close a deal?

0:08:36.9 PY: One thing we ask is, whenever we reach out or send the request about confirming the client contact information or asking about HOA or any other form that we asked ask you to fill out, we would love to have that in a timely manner, because the last thing that everybody wants is a delay in closing because three days before closing you find out that it takes 10 days to get HOA docs, and we just got that information. So it really comes down to communication. So being up front with a title company about any issues that the seller or the buyer has that could cause a delay later in the process is all we ask. And then if we were aware of that then we can address that upfront and stay on task.

0:09:25.1 GS: And by the way, viewers too, if you have any questions for Paul, please please throw them out there. Somebody asked if you guys are in California or Florida yet.

0:09:33.3 PY: Not in California, in Florida, we are there. We don’t have a physical office yet. We do business for some of our national clients and out-of-state clients, we look to launch in Northern Florida initially, probably within the next six to 12 months.

0:09:52.6 GS: Very cool, exciting. Now, if for some crazy reason that somebody’s watching and they say, no, we don’t wanna use Verus Title. What would you say? Well, okay, if you’re gonna use somebody else, make sure that you ask your title company these questions, or make sure you do your homework in these areas to make sure that you’re getting good product, ’cause we do have a lot of agents that are new in the business, or they really haven’t… Maybe they kind of inherited something from somebody else who trained them as an agent but they’ve moved to a new area, and so they’re trying to establish that relationship. And again, I don’t know why you would use anyone else, but if they did, what would you say? What would you say to look for?

0:10:34.4 PY: I would say many title companies are good at selling to an agent. But one thing I would check is do you have or does the title company have that depth of underwriting expertise. We… Their style of employing attorneys, underwriting attorneys in many states where we operate, so we can handle the most complicated transaction. And lastly, we view the relationship with the agent as a partnership, so we’re not chasing a deal, but we think of it, hey, how can we help you in your business? We’ll tell you if something… This is the kind of transaction that we would not be comfortable in handling as well. We’re okay with that, we’re not just gonna be chasing that last transaction. So those are the two things how you should be asking, and really thinking about it when you choose a title company.

0:11:34.6 GS: Somebody asked if you guys are in Texas, and I think the answer is yes, on that one.

0:11:39.2 PY: Yes, we are. We have a good office right now in Plano, Texas, so that is our… Initially our focus, and we’re looking to expand in Dallas-Fort Worth area and other markets around there in the next couple of months, and then the rest of the state for the next 12 months.

0:12:00.6 GS: [0:12:00.6] ____.

0:12:04.6 PY: Sometimes we do, but our preference is not to. Whenever we can, we would love to close ourselves with our employees because then we can guarantee that quality throughout the closing process, because our employee will know what the documents are, they’ll know what the numbers are. The notary may say, hey, I don’t really know, call the title company, and that’s not the kind of experience we wanna give to a client. If the client is out of state, out of town, we… Sometimes we’ll use notaries, but we prefer to actually to do a remote online notarization if possible, especially on the seller side. This way, we can still be the ones handling that closing experience, even if we’re not there in person.

0:12:51.7 PY: And of course, where we do a lot as well is going to where the client is. So if the client may find it inconvenient to come to the office for some reason… In fact just this week, we had one client who had to close at the hospital. They’re buying and they got very sick, they closed in an emergency room at the hospital. And we had clients who were giving a birth and they still wanted to close in their house because they wanna be in the new house once they have the new baby. So there’s all kinds of situations like that or it could be a physician that needs to… Has long shifts and they cannot leave the hospital during regular business hours, so we’ll go wherever the client is. And that’s part of the service, but we prefer to do it ourselves rather than to send a notary if possible.

0:13:46.5 GS: Gotcha, and I think the audience picked up… So when I asked you, do you use notaries? I was relaying a question there. I think I was on mute, so my apologies, but they got it. They got the question, what I was asking there. So you got a lot of love here on Facebook, people asking to come to their location as well as people like Rachelle Jones-Bell, she says, “Come on to Houston.” Somebody else… Same person said they love it, and they’re excited. So we’re excited for you and excited to see Verus expand. Any last comments before we let you go or anything, any insight that you give agents? You’ve seen a lot of transactions.

0:14:25.1 PY: I just wanna thank for all the agents who already worked with us for your support and your trust in us, and we don’t view this lightly. You have choice in who you work with, and we wanna make sure we do the best job on every single transaction, so I wanna thank you for your trust and support.

0:14:44.7 GS: Awesome. Paul, thank you for coming on and sharing about the company, and I’ve heard nothing but good things about Verus and look forward to seeing you guys continue to expand and serve some of the agents.

0:15:00.4 PY: Thank you for having me here.

0:15:02.4 GS: Alright, we’ll let you go.