Monthly Archives: June 2018

Resources, Title Insurance

Welcome to Florida: Buyer Pick or Seller Pick?

Here’s a little disclaimer Aaron M. Davis, CEO of Florida Agency Network, likes to give when speaking on title insurance in Florida.

“Florida, where a judgment can attach to a piece of property simply by filing a document with the clerk, and the name doesn’t even have to be spelled correctly.

Florida, where the county may or may not have to actually FILE an enforcement action on a property for it to attach, as long as they were thinking about doing it at some time.

Florida, where an unlicensed contractor can pull a permit on a house to put on a new roof, not close a permit, and 10 years later you have to hire a licensed contractor to go back, fix the prior’s work, and close the permit.

Florida, were the seller picks the title agent or attorney, and pays for title insurance, but only depending on the county you are in. Or, even depending on what PART of a county you’re in.”

Across the country, there are 37 states where the buyer picks/pays for title and 12 states where it’s customary for the seller to do so.

Then there’s Florida.

Where the Buyer picks in:

  • The Panhandle
  • Sometimes around the beach areas in Sarasota
  • South Manatee County (but only to the Manatee River, where North is customary for seller to pick)
  • Miami-Dade County
  • Broward County
  • Collier County
  • Some of Palm Beach County, but not North…..

Then, seller picks in the majority of the other areas…

HUH???

Title scholars, settlement experts, underwriting counsel, and others  who still say things like “HUD statements, policies in triplicate, dot matrix printers, and white out,” have contemplated WHY this occurs in Florida.

Well, Aaron has figured it out!  We can blame two men named Henry. (Of course, it’s a man’s fault.)

Henry Plant and Henry Flagler

These two gentlemen were railroad tycoons who ventured deep into Florida. The areas they ended up in became tourist destinations, with great beaches, water access, and lots of construction opportunities. Plant’s rail line landed in Sarasota, and Flagler’s line had a few stop down the East coast of Florida, landing in Palm Beach and Miami.

With all those tourists and construction came the attorneys who handled those transactions, several of who previously resided in New York. And in New York, you guessed it – it’s customary for the buyer to pick and pay for title.

As for coastal areas, well, those buyers are typically wealthy, so we guess they just get stuck with the bill.

Real Estate Headline News

How Bitcoin, Blockchain, and Cryptocurrency are Changing Real Estate

In case you’ve been living under a rock somewhere, in a cave, underneath the ocean, or Mars, there has been this hysteria around Cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency comes in several forms, or several coins, we should say, the most popular being Bitcoin. Several others dominating the landscape include Ethereum, Litecoin, Ripple, and approximately 1,600 others at the time of writing this post.

The history of Bitcoin is an intriguing story itself, created by Satoshi Nakamoto  in 2008 and released weeks following the global market crash leading to the Great Recession. Perhaps more interesting is that Satoshi Nakamoto is still unknown to this day. He wrote the first white paper on Bitcoin, and created the Blockchain database on which Bitcoin resides. However, no one really knows who this person is. Although mysterious and interesting enough, this doesn’t pertain for our purposes here. What DOES pertain is the technology behind Bitcoin, which is the blockchain.

Blockchain is being built up to be the next version of the internet; Immutable ledger system, unhackable, transparent, and definitely disruptive. However, in a good way. There are several industries that will no doubt be affected by blockchain once it gains acceptance and popularity. You can google hundreds if not thousands of companies who already work on adding blockchain to their existing technology and infrastructure.  For example, IBM, Chase, Walmart, FedEx, British Airways are just a few.  The brilliance of blockchain is its open ledger format. Once a transaction, whether financial or informational, is executed, the nodes on the network all confirm the data and update the ledger, which allows the latest “block” on the “chain” to be added and confirmed.

Industries in third-party payment processing (banks, money transfer companies, credit card companies, payment processors, payroll companies) will all be affected. Medical Industry with the significant amount data and payments will be affected. Even Crowdfunding platforms and gambling sites will be impacted.

But perhaps none more than Real Estate, title insurance, closing and settlement service providers. As blockchain is adopted into these industries, and paper records and PDFs are replaced by blockchain, we can soon envision a day where “click button, buy house” becomes more of a reality.

One company who is certainly progressive in its technology and use of Blockchain is Propy. Propy is a global real estate marketplace with a decentralized title registry. Propy aims to solve the problems facing international real estate transactions by creating a novel, unified property store and asset transfer platform for the global real estate industry. It allows buyers, sellers, brokers, and escrow/title agents/notaries to come together through the utilization of a suite of smart contracts on blockchain to facilitate transactions.

Propy completed the first Blockchain transaction late last year in the Ukraine. Then, in March 2018, they completed the first US transaction in Vermont.

The key to making these transactions happen is to first understand the technology, and second, understand how the flow of currency, whether US Dollars (also known as fiat, or paper money, in the crypto world) or cryptocurrency, work in these transactions. Currently, title agencies and law firms in the US are bound by several laws, regulations and underwriting restrictions which only allow them to accept “good funds” as payment. Right now, good funds are defined as cashier’s check or wire transfers cleared via the Federal Reserve banking platform. One reason for this is for tax reporting purposes. Other reasons are for Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements.

There are several companies now working on the exchange integration to convert fiat currency to cryptocurrency, which then would allow for the acceptance of cryptocurrency for closing.

There have been a number of reported transactions who have in fact utilized cryptocurrency to buy a home. However, what likely occurred is the crypto was sold via an exchange, transferred to a traditional banking platform in order to wire US dollars to a title company or law firm’s escrow account. One of the issues still unresolved is the 1099 form and taxation of capital gains related to cryptocurrency. The IRS is quickly adapting to the virtual currency world as seen here.

Although there is still much ground to cover, it is truly exciting to see the technological advancements taking place in the real estate and settlement arena.