🐐🎙️The Remembrance Clause - Part 1

Every industry has its ghosts. For title agents, they don’t wear white sheets or rattle chains—they live in the dead files, the canceled deals that drain our time, money, and sanity. This is a story about those ghosts. It’s fiction, yes—but only just. Because if you’ve ever watched profits vanish with a canceled file, you know how real these hauntings can feel.

Happy Spooky Season!

-Cheryl

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I never used to track my cancellations. They were just part of the job—noise in the system, like an appraisal coming in low or a buyer getting cold feet. It happens. I’d joke that canceled files were paper ghosts with unfinished business. We even filed them in a drawer labeled “Ghosts.” The humor helped lighten the disappointment and hurt that came with every cancellation. It was a tradition my grandfather started back when the company was still new. I’d been working for the family business since high school, but my dad suddenly passed away a few month ago, and I’d recently taken over as head of the operations. I decided the tradition was cute and heartfelt, so I’d kept it. In fact, I’d tried not to make too many changes. This was a good company and I intended to keep it that way.

You see my team and I, we genuinely care about our customers. They aren’t just numbers to us. Every member of my staff owns shares in this company and each file is assigned to a single title clerk who works with those buyers, sellers and borrowers, holding their hands through every nerve racking step of the transaction from Agreement of Sale or Loan Commitment through Signing and beyond. We get to know them. We hear their stories about the time Cara broke her leg jumping off the tree swing or how grandma and grandpa are buried behind the barn. Selling your home isn’t just a business transaction, it’s a life altering event and we are the ushers. We also hear about the hope from newly-weds buying their first home, expecting parents who need just one more bedroom, and proud parents refinancing to help pay for the college education of their eldest. So when a transaction dies, we feel the loss in our hearts and, if I’m being honest, our wallets, too.

We’ve been known to go to some astounding lengths to resuscitate transactions that are on life support too. Like the time Mike left a closing table and mowed an overgrown lawn in his closing suit so that everyone would stop arguing and sign the deed. It was such a sight the neighbor posted pictures on Facebook and tagged us!

So when a deal dies, we feel it. We feel the loss of the oddly intimate bonds we formed with buyers and sellers, we feel the dashed hopes and renewed fears, and we fight the unshakable feeling that somehow, we’re the ones that failed when our CPR wasn’t enough.

If that weren’t bad enough, we feel the financial loss too. A $125 lien search, a $300 HOA estoppel letter, a $25 tax certification, a $40 software fee, and on it goes, all adding up to hundreds of dollars per file, thousands of dollars per year.

So, when a deal dies, we hold a little funeral, say a short goodbye, and send it off to the drawer labeled “Ghosts of Deals that Died.” Really, we’d rather shred them. I think it would be more cathartic. Then we wouldn’t need to look at them anymore. We could forget they ever existed. But state law requires us to keep all records for 20 years and there are those occasional Zombie deals that rise from the dead weeks or months later. So, we pay our respects and we bury them the cemetery drawer.

One night, a few weeks ago, I stayed late working on a file we were desperately trying to close the next day. I was the only one in the office. Perhaps if, I’m honest, I was feeling a bit melancholy. I’d already had 2 deals cancel this month it wasn’t looking good for this one either. But, I swear, when I walked past that drawer, I heard a little whisper, ‘We almost closed.’

I glanced back, but there was no one in the office. Just me. Being paranoid.

A few minutes later, I need to make some more copies and walked past the drawer again. I was rummaging through a stack of papers as I walked, but I swear, again, I heard a whisper, “We had funding. You killed us.” I dropped my stack of papers, ran from the office and went home.

I told myself it was stress. The HVAC. The rustle of old paper.

When I arrived the next day, the files I’d dropped on the floor were sitting neatly stacked on my desk. I felt bad about having left such a mess and asked around to my co-workers who’d arrived before me so I could apologize and thank them for cleaning it up, but no one admitted having been the one to do it. In fact, no one even saw the papers on the floor.

A few days later, Marjory asked me to help her with a tech glitch. A canceled refinance showed up twice in her system under two different names, both showing a status of “pending.” And a commitment she’d voided weeks earlier reappeared in her open orders queue, waiting for review like it had never died. I helped her to update the statuses, remove the duplicate file, and re-cancel everything. Huh, 3 cancelations. “Marjory,” I asked, “do you usually have 3 deals cancel in a single month?”

Marjory didn’t make eye contact, instead, she fiddled with a string on her shirt hem.

“Marjory, I’m sorry, I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m curious. I’ve had three die this month too and I just got a worrying phone call about a fourth. I’m concerned. Could this be a trend? A bigger problem than just my spate of bad luck? I know I don’t have as much as experience as you, or…” I fought back the tears. “Or my dad. Is this normal?”

“It happens sometimes,” she said hastily, still not looking up at me. “Thanks for your help. I really need to get prepped for my closing this afternoon.”

I took that as my cue to leave, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something she wasn’t telling me.

The next day, I was clacking away on my keyboard, typing up a legal description for a commitment when I heard a strange noise. I stilled my fingers and listened. Yup, there it was again. It sounded like someone was crying. I stepped into our storage room and found Cathy standing in front of the cemetery filing cabinet, quietly crying over a file. She must have heard me enter, because as she turned to toward me with mascara running down her cheeks, I saw, to my horror, that she was clutching not one, not two, but ten dead files. Bits of dogged eared papers peaked out here and there, the folders themselves looked like they’d been through a battle zone. I could see a coffee cup ring on the top one. With tears still streaming down her face, Cathy cried, “I tried so hard! I swear! I went above and beyond for all of them, but I couldn’t save a single one. I don’t deserve to be here anymore.” She hastily shoved the files in the Ghosts drawer and ran from the room.

I went back to my desk and started pulling up reports.

Last year, we averaged a 2% cancelation rate throughout the year. There were a few peaks or clusters of cancelations, that could make for a concerning week, but across the year, it averaged out to nothing major. It’s what I expected I would find. Over the years, we’d built up great relationships with our referral partners. Part of onboarding new partners, especially when they are also new to the industry, is a discussion about timing and when is the right time to place an order for title. We make sure they understand that an order placed too soon is more likely to cancel, and that costs us a lot of money out of pocket and an order placed too later risks not closing on time, costs more in out of pocket fees for rush orders, and really, is an unnecessary stress and burned on us all. We’ve done our due diligence to ensure our relationships, our communications and our workflows are optimized both for efficiency and for minimizing losses. While my grandfather was a great sales man, it was my dad who really had a mind for business and he worked hard to grow what grandad started into a well-oiled machine stuffed inside the friendly as a teddy bear exterior that had attracted so much business.

I had to stop when I hit December. I had a closing starting shortly and the listing agent had just shown up.

Later that night, I ran more numbers, backlit by my second monitor, coffee gone cold at my elbow. Courier fees. HOA estoppels. Lien searches. Software charges that ticked like a metronome, $40 here, $75 there, whether the deal lived or died. I totaled them: hundreds per file. Thousands per quarter even at a measly 2% cancelation rate. And nothing coming back. The bleed was quiet, but constant. “It’s the cost of doing business,” I suppose my dad would have said.

Then I pulled up the reports for this year. The first quarter looked good. We were still averaging a 2% cancelation rate. Dad passed last spring. After his death, the reports took a dark turn. In April and May our cancelation rate clicked up to 4%. Ok, it was a rough couple of months for us all. Grieving and adjusting to life in the office without him as our leader. Some fallout was to be expected.

But in June, just as we were hitting the pinnacle of the summer sales market, our cancelation rate jumped to 6%. How did I not know? I thought back on June. We were so busy. I was working til 8pm most nights and so were most of the staff. How much of that work was wasted? How many late nights away from family that we can never get back and for what?

At first I thought it was burnout. Too many twelve-hour days, too much caffeine. But Dad taught me better, so I ran more reports, compiled a spreadsheet. Looking for a pattern, a cause. Did we onboard a new referral partner do wasn’t understanding the proper timing of placing an order? Had the interest rates spiked and priced buyers out of their mortgages before they locked in their rates? Did I, oh, how could I even entertain this thought, Did I have a rogue title clerk with a bad attitude that had slipped my attention?

No matter how I sliced and diced those numbers, there was no pattern. I reviewed the list. Canceled before commitments, payoff demands never ordered, unsigned deeds. Deals were canceling within days of the order being placed to hours after closing was supposed to start. The reasons were just as varied and mostly common: low appraisal, failed inspection, contentious seller who wants to nickel and dime every detail at the settlement table with a buyer with nothing to lose. And a few more uncommon but not unheard of reasons: buyer lost their job, buyer took out a huge loan on a brand new car, seller died, realtor and lender both ordered title insurance from different companies. No patterns. No consistency. No one to blame. No solution in sight.

It was after hours, the office dark except for the glow of my monitor. I was rereading my morbid list of “Causes of Death” when I heard it: a voice, thin and papery, sliding out of the banker’s boxes stacked against the wall.

We almost closed.

I froze.

The whisper came again, from another box. Our dreams were dashed. We were almost there. We relied on you.

I glanced at the clock. 11pm. Geeze. No wonder my eyes were going crossed and I was hearing voices. Spooked, I grabbed my things and called it a night. Obviously, I wasn’t going to fix this problem today.

The next morning, after I procrastinated as long as possible by chatting my way through the office with anyone who didn’t look bleary eyed and morning murderous, I set a fresh, steaming hot cup of coffee on my desk and resigned myself to looking at more reports. I hovered my mouse over the “Next” button. Part of me didn’t want to know what July’s numbers were. What if it got worse?

What if my dad didn’t actually believe in me and on his death bed, unbeknown to anyone, he cursed me and our beloved title agency?

I shook my head. My dad had trained me well. He believed in me. He loved me. I was just being paranoid. I’m sure the numbers for July were just fine.

I clicked the button. My heart sank. It had been a busy summer. Our order volume for July was up 10% over June and 15% over the previous July. But our cancelation rate had also jumped to 9%. I must not have noticed because we had so much order volume, the money was flowing through the accounts, we were hopping and everything felt ok.

Like tearing off a Band-Aid, I clicked that button one more time and pulled up our numbers for August. Order volume had dropped off a bit as per usual with the end of summer vacation extravaganza and back to school distractions. But our cancelation rate didn’t slump with it, no it had ticked up to an alarming 12.75%!

Good God what was happening here?!? Was I really so terrible at leading this company that our customers were abandoning their dream homes just to get away from me?

Down the hall I heard a draw slam shut. The ominous noise echoed throughout the office and for a moment, everything went still. Keyboards stopped clacking, the copier stopped whooshing, and voices fell silent.

Hand shaking, I clicked the button again. Sound in the office resumed, muted it behind the roar of blood rushing in my ears. It was only September 19th, but our cancelation rate this month had skyrocketed to terrifying 20%. The room seemed to darken and I looked up.

Marjory stood in the doorway to my office. She glanced up and down the hall, then came in and closed the door. “Maya, we need to talk,” she said…

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or continued reading in “How I Stopped Bleeding Money: Title Agent’s Guide to Minimizing Losses from Canceled Deals”

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Inside, you’ll discover:

• 👻 Nightmares Brought to Life: The exciting conclusion to “The Remembrance Clause,” your cancelation nightmares brought to life in a scary because it could be true, entertaining story

• 📝Protect yourself with smart policies: Real-world playbooks to minimize cancelation losses from agents in the trenches.

• 🗺️ Comprehensive Compliance Guide: A state-by-state breakdown of what’s actually legal when it comes to cancellation fees.

• 📑 Ready-to-use templates: Sample Closing Cost & Cancellation Policy Acknowledgement form pulled right from my agency’s files.

Canceled files may be inevitable, but losing money on them is optional. Don’t let the ghosts of closings gone wrong to haunt your legers.

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Stay Wicked,
Cheryl

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**DISCLAIMER**
This story is for entertainment purposes. The use of story telling is sometimes used as an instructional device. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination, are used fictitiously or have been used with permission. Any resemblance of fictionalizations to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental