Search and exam is still mostly manual in an automated industry. But why?

Nearly every step in a real estate closing has gone digital over the past decade. From buyers signing disclosures on a tablet, to notaries working remotely, to lenders running automated underwriting models that clear a loan file in minutes. We’ve certainly come a long way in automating the process. And yet, search and exam, the process that determines whether a property can transfer clean title, has mostly stayed where it was 20 years ago: An examiner working through county records by hand, or a team overseas doing the same thing at a lower hourly rate. While some parts of the search and exam process are now digital, it’s almost impossible to find a search and exam workflow that doesn’t have a human in the middle. That’s an odd place for the industry to still be stuck, especially when one considers how central this process is to everything that follows. The reason it’s still manual Ask an agency owner why search and exam hasn’t automated the way the rest of the file has, and the answer almost always comes back to trust. I have had that conversation more times than I can count, and I don’t argue with it. An underwriter has to stand behind that commitment letter. A missed lien or an ...