🐐Title Underground📰: The Check is In the Mail, House Falls Into the Ocean, TRID Ready to Pop Like a Pimple
Plus Westcor Wants AI to Answer First, Fannie Mae Gets Bitcoin-Backed and a 53% Homeownership Surprise (2-Aug-2026)
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⚠️ TRID Caught in Three-Way Squeeze. Will it pop like a pimple?
As if the CFPB request for information wasn’t enough…
Read the CFPB request and submit comments by August 10 →
🎥 TRID Architect Breaks Down What the CFPB is Looking at in its RFI
🐐 TRID Is Back on the Operating Table—and Someone Brought a Chainsaw: What Title Agents Need to Know
🐐 TRID Data: Closing Costs, Consumer Confusion and Title Workflows
President Trump’s nominee for permanent CFPB director, Brian Johnson, has said eliminating the Bureau is “not my intention.” While considerably less apocalyptic than Acting Director Russell Vought’s effort to halt most CFPB work and eliminate much of its staff. It is not necessarily comforting. Johnson would not identify a Vought decision with which he disagreed and said he would keep an open mind about the administration’s plan to reduce the Bureau from approximately 1,700 employees to roughly 550.
AND now the House Financial Services Committee is requesting public feedback on a 70-page discussion draft that would overhaul CFPB funding, rulemaking, supervision and enforcement. The proposal could affect how the Bureau creates and revisits rules governing mortgage closings, evaluates burdens on small businesses, uses UDAAP authority and interacts with companies regulated by state insurance departments. For title agents navigating TRID, RESPA and sometimes-murky federal expectations, this is an opportunity to explain where unclear guidance, duplicative oversight or regulation-by-enforcement creates real operational problems.
Comments may address any of the committee’s questions and should be emailed to fsc119@mail.house.gov by August 21, 2026
Researchers at the Federal Reserve of Minneapolis have introduced a new metric for measuring homeownership
The “homeowners-to-population” (HPOP) ratio, which reveals that only 53% of U.S. adults own homes, significantly lower than the traditional owner-occupancy rate of 65%, highlighting the economic realities and changing living arrangements in America.
🎥 The ALTA 48 Endorsement series and how it relates to tribal limited waivers and consents.
A Bank Lent $3.85 Million on a Home Falling Into the Ocean—How Did It Happen?
Why Rising Premiums and Falling Claims Don’t Tell the Whole Title Story
🐐Wicked Trends & Forces🌳
The patterns worth paying attention to…
Is it Time to Bring Your Payment Processing into The Digital Age?
The closing may be digital, but payment processing often still runs on paper. Printing, signing, mailing, tracking and occasionally reissuing checks creates a block of administrative work that is easy to overlook because it is scattered across multiple employees and several days.
The operational cost is not just the time spent printing the check. It is the entire chain surrounding it: securing signatures, maintaining check stock, confirming delivery, responding to status calls, handling lost checks, placing stops, issuing replacements and documenting what happened.
But efficiency is only part of the challenge. CertifID’s Q2 fraud-recovery data shows that seller net-proceeds fraud rose from 4% of its Q1 submissions to 14% in Q2, tying mortgage payoff fraud as the second-most-common category in its dataset. Buyer cash-to-close fraud still led at 35%, but the larger pattern is clear—payment risk exists wherever money enters, leaves or changes direction.
Title technology providers are beginning to address that burden across the payment lifecycle. 🔒 Closinglock’s new SecurePay capabilities allow buyers to submit earnest money, option fees and cash to close—even before a file has been created—while its EMD Return Workflow allows deposits to be returned digitally to a previously verified bank account. Together, they target two places where an otherwise-digital transaction commonly falls back into manual work: collecting buyer funds at the beginning and returning them when a deal terminates. Whereas, Deluxe is making it faster and easier to disburse funds with their eCheck system that is integrated directly into your title production software.
However, digitizing a broken process will not fix it unless security controls come with it. CloseSimple’s seven “non-negotiables” provide a useful framework: keep payment communications inside a predictable, authenticated path; verify every party; independently confirm changes; and build secure steps into the title production workflow so staff do not have to remember them under pressure.
Taken together, these developments point to a larger trend…The industry is beginning to treat money movement as one connected operational system—from the first buyer payment through refunds, payoffs and final disbursements. The real opportunity is not merely to eliminate the check. It is to eliminate the manual chasing, disconnected systems and preventable risk surrounding it.
And this is why Wicked Title Forum gathered a panel of industry experts to dig in deeper. On August 12th, we’re sitting down with Deluxe, American Escrow Reconciliation, FIT Agency, ShortTrack, and Near North Title Group to examine where paper checks are still creating bottlenecks, what those delays actually cost title operations and what really happens when electronic payments are introduced into a tightly controlled escrow environment. Mark your calendars 📅 and keep an 👀 on your inbox. This is one you won’t want to miss.
👀 Things Wandering Toward Your Workflow
New tools, vendor launches, and tech experiments making their way toward the closing table.
👀 Get on the Workflow Watchlist
Westcor Gives Agents an AI Shortcut Through Its Underwriting Library
Underwriter IQ gives Westcor agents on-demand answers drawn from the underwriter’s approved state guidance, manuals, rate materials and procedural resources. It is intended to handle routine questions and point agents toward the applicable source, cutting down the time spent digging through documents or waiting for help. Complex risks and transaction-specific decisions still go to a human underwriter—Westcor describes the tool as the first stop, not the final word. It is available now through Westcor Central, with additional approved materials being added over time.
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⚖️Legal
National
The “Investment” That May Be a Mortgage After All
Congress and a growing number of states are moving to reclassify a tricky home-equity product—with consequences for how title agents identify, document and pay it off at closing.
Plus the house voted to ease banking regulations.
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State
🤖PropTech, Cyber Security & Fraud
Fraud Refunds, Unprovable Wire Controls and a Bitcoin-Backed Mortgage
This month’s PropTech roundup follows the money—from mortgage-relief scams and wire-control blind spots to smarter AI adoption and a new kind of asset showing up at the closing table.
🔒Reserved for Members Upgrade here.
📖 Book of the Month
Liz Halabu Casselman’s Not Just a Title: A Journey of Growth in the Title Industry is less a technical guide than an honest look at building a career, managing people and finding your voice inside the title industry. Casselman shares the insecurities, leadership mistakes and uncomfortable growing pains behind starting an agency and acquiring companies—experiences that rarely make it into polished professional bios. Her larger lesson is that better leadership requires boundaries, empathy and a carefully built network of people willing to tell the truth. It is a quick, relatable read for anyone discovering that earning the title was only the beginning.
📰 Headlines tell you what’s happening.
Everything else is what saves you time—and helps you make better decisions.
💻 Digital helps you handle the file. | 📬 Print helps you run the business.
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Stay Wicked,
Cheryl
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The Wicked Title Forum is a collaborative resource. If you spot something outdated or inaccurate, leave a comment—we’ll get it fixed.
**DISCLAIMER**
Content is for informational purposes, operational awareness and workflow strategy. While every effort is made to ensure accuracy, it is not meant to be a compliance directive or replace the specific legal/financial advice of your retained experts. As always evaluate new information & tools with your underwriter/attorney, accountant/financial advisor, IT/security team, and internal policies, as needed, before implementation.
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