According to HousingWire, Craig Haskins has taken over as president of the American Land Title Association this week. Haskins brings more than thirty years of experience in the title industry and currently leads Knight Barry Title Group, which operates across multiple states with dozens of offices and hundreds of employees. As he steps into this leadership role, he's focused on pushing the industry toward modernization while keeping consumer protections intact.
Haskins emphasizes that the title industry needs to find ways to become more efficient and address housing affordability concerns, but not at the expense of the coverage that protects homeowners. He acknowledges that technology like automation and artificial intelligence can streamline processes that have traditionally been slow and labor-intensive. However, he's cautious about alternative products that promise lower upfront costs. According to Haskins, cheaper options like attorney opinion letters or automated public-record searches may miss risks that aren't visible in public records, such as fraud, forgery, deed theft, and seller impersonation. These problems often end up creating significant costs for homeowners down the road during future transactions.
One of Haskins's concerns centers on Fannie Mae's title acceptance pilots, which are being tested in certain refinance transactions. He told HousingWire that there's been little transparency or public explanation about how these pilots work and what they actually accomplish. He wants the industry and policymakers to provide meaningful comparisons between alternative products and traditional insured title transactions, including their true long-term costs. Fraud and forgery particularly concern him, as he notes that forty percent of refinance claims costs deal with these issues.
Beyond policy changes, Haskins wants the title industry to do a much better job explaining what it does to everyday homeowners. He believes that when title insurance appears as a line item on a closing statement, most people don't understand the work that went into protecting their transaction. His solution is to provide homeowners with plain-language summaries showing what problems were actually found and fixed during the title process, rather than just listing technical descriptions of searches and records reviews.
What I am seeing locally here in the Bay Area and across the East Bay is that buyers and sellers are increasingly price-conscious, and they're asking hard questions about every fee at closing. Haskins's push for transparency and plain-language explanations really resonates with the clients I work with every day. People want to understand what they're paying for, and they deserve to know that title insurance is doing real work to protect them from some very real risks. The conversation about affordability is important, but not if it means cutting corners on protections that could save someone thousands of dollars years later.
