🐐 Membership | 🔍 Find Answers | 🛒 Shop | 📢 Partner With Us
Brought to you by our friends, contributors & sponsors:🔒 Closinglock, 🌍 Foreign Tax CPA, 🪄Business Witch Academy, 🧱 Brickhouse Consulting, 🖊️Dotted Line Signings & Our Paying Readers
📢 Be a Sponsor
Stop Waiting for the Housing Market to Rescue You
The Fed hiked rates by 25 basis points. Mortgage rates jumped to their highest levels since early 2025. And the recovery title companies have been waiting on just moved farther out again.
At some point, “when rates come down” stops being a growth strategy.
Because while a large chunk of the industry is still watching the same national housing numbers, other companies are finding revenue in places that barely show up in the usual market conversation.
Not because they cracked the code on mortgage rates.
Because they stopped making mortgage rates the center of the plan.
🔒 Washington is demanding cheaper mortgages. The Fed is under pressure to cut. And yet mortgage rates just hit a 15-month high. If these are the signals you’re watching to forecast future title volume, you’ve already missed the boat.
The useful signals show up earlier—in places that do not look like title data at all. Our 2026-27 Wicked Title Market Forecast comes out this week. Subscribers get it for free. Upgrade to find out what we’re seeing.
Growth Is Hiding in the Parts of the Market You Are Not Watching
Most title agencies are still waiting for the same thing: a normal housing market. The companies growing anyway have stopped treating that as the only door.
The Title Agents Podcast’s Q2 review of the Big Four found strong results without a residential housing comeback, pointing instead to commercial transactions, agency volume, higher fees and operating efficiency. Investors Title’s second-quarter results tell a similar story from a smaller underwriter: net premiums written rose to $67.5 million from $54.5 million a year earlier, while escrow and other title-related fees also increased. Stewart, meanwhile, spent September buying deeper specialization in telecommunications, energy and infrastructure through Tower Title.
Those are not three copies of the same strategy. They are three versions of the same signal: waiting for national purchase volume to rescue the growth plan is optional. The more useful question is where transactions are still happening, who controls access to them, and whether your agency is built to serve that work well enough to be chosen on purpose.
🔒The companies finding growth right now are not all chasing the same customers—or even the same kinds of transactions. It is what becomes visible when you look underneath where that growth is coming from—and what those examples suggest an independent agency should be looking for in its own market.
Upgrade to see where the growth is actually showing up—and what to build before you chase it.
Growth Intelligence You Can Steal
The feature above is the strategy. This is the swipe file.
A few smart tools, ideas and growth lessons crossed our desk that do not need a full article to be worth stealing. Here are the ones with enough practical value to put to work.
Google Will Tell You Which Social Posts People Are Actually Finding
Google Search Console’s Platform Properties feature now lets businesses connect Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube accounts and see which search queries surface their social content, how often it appears, what gets clicked and which older posts are finding new life. For a title agency creating local buyer, seller, fraud or closing education, that turns search visibility into free market research: instead of guessing what people want explained, you can see what they are already looking for.
🔒A prospecting shortcut. A growth mistake that looks like marketing. A positioning problem almost every agency thinks it has already solved, but most of them haven’t. And one scaling lesson that gets more important the bigger the opportunity becomes.
They are practical, specific, and very stealable.
Stay Wicked,
Cheryl
Contact Me (or hit reply)
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.
This site is partially supported by sponsor ads and sponsored content.