UPDATE Sept. 30, 2025
On Sept. 30, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) announced that it will postpone reporting requirements of the Anti-Money Laundering Regulations for Residential Real Estate Transfers Rule until March 1, 2026.
FinCEN also released the Real Estate Report Form that title & escrow companies will need to submit for transactions that qualify to be reported under the forthcoming regulations. What this form would look like had been unknown up until Sept. 30.
To implement the extension, FinCEN issued a temporary order granting exemptive relief from the reporting requirements. Title & escrow industry leaders welcomed news of the extension until March of next year.
“There are serious concerns about the immense financial and compliance burdens of this rule on the small businesses that comprise 90% of the title insurance industry,” said Chris Morton, CEO of the American Land Title Association (ALTA). “This delay gives ALTA more time to work with FinCEN to revise this costly rule that places significant burdens on title companies.”
ORIGINAL ARTICLE WITH UPDATES TO REFLECT SEPT. 30 DEVELOPMENTS:
On August 29, 2024, FinCEN (the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network) finalized a new rule that expands anti-money laundering requirements to cover certain non-financed residential real estate transactions involving legal entities and trusts.
Starting March 1, 2026, title & escrow companies will be required to report qualifying transactions through the new “Real Estate Report Form.”
Here’s what the rule entails and how your business can prepare ahead of the compliance deadline.
What’s Changing Under the Final Rule
ALTA states that the final rule will mandate “select real estate professionals to submit reports and keep records about certain high-risk, non-financed transfers of residential real property to specified legal entities and trusts.”
Here’s a breakdown of what these terms mean in practice:
“Select real estate professionals”
FinCEN expects that the reporting responsibility will usually fall to title agents, escrow agents, settlement agents, or attorneys. If more than one party is involved, FinCEN outlines a “reporting cascade” to determine the ultimate responsible party based on who performs certain functions in the transaction.
“Residential real property”
The rule applies to most common types of residential property, including:
- Single-family homes, townhomes, condos, and co-ops (even in large buildings)
- Entire apartment buildings designed for 1–4 families
- Mixed-use properties (e.g., a storefront with residential units above)
- Vacant land—if the buyer intends to build a home on it
“Non-financed transfer”
Generally speaking, this is a cash purchase, meaning the buyer isn’t getting a mortgage or institutional loan. More precisely, a transfer is considered non-financed if the buyer receives no loan that is both:
- Secured by the property, and
- Issued by a financial institution that follows anti-money laundering (AML) rules and files Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs)
Under these conditions, if the buyer is using a private lender or non-bank financing, the deal might still count as non-financed under FinCEN’s rule.
“Transferee entity and transfer trust”
The buyer is not an individual but rather a corporation, LLC, partnership, or trust. Both domestic and foreign entities and trusts are covered by the reporting requirement. Transactions involving layered ownership, shell entities, or trusts are likely to receive added scrutiny under the new rule due to their historical use in obscuring ownership.
If a transaction falls under these criteria, the reporting person must file a Real Estate Report with FinCEN. The report is due by the last day of the month following the closing month or within 30 calendar days of the closing date, whichever comes first.
How This Differs from the GTOs
If this sounds familiar, it’s because the rule echoes the temporary Geographic Targeting Orders (GTOs) previously issued by FinCEN. But there are a few key differences:
- The new rule applies nationwide, not just to specific cities.
- It’s permanent, not time-limited like the GTOs.
- It mandates formal, electronic reporting via the BSA E-Filing System, the same portal currently used for other Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) reports.
FinCEN estimates the rule will require about 800-850k reports to be filed annually. Note: Real Estate Geographic Targeting Orders will remain in effect, according to FinCEN.
Best Practices To Prepare Your Title & Escrow Business
Now that the Real Estate Report Form has been released, title & escrow companies should begin familiarizing themselves with it. The five-page form requires information on the person doing the reporting, the property in question, and the transferee and people associated with them. It also asks for information on payment and the transferor.
You can start preparing in several other meaningful ways:
- Familiarize yourself with the ALTA buyer & seller information collection forms. The American Land Title Association (ALTA) has released buyer and seller information collection forms to help companies begin gathering the necessary data for FinCEN reporting.
- These forms are meant to be completed by the consumer.
- Title & escrow companies will then use the information to complete the FinCEN Real Estate Report Form.
- Review the forms now to ensure your current workflows either support or can be adapted to collect all required data.
- Start preparing for FinCEN electronic reporting via the BSA E-Filing System.
- Each reporting organization will need a login.gov account to access the system.
- During setup, you’ll designate a Supervisory User, who will manage access and oversee filings across your organization.
- Start “dry runs” now to prepare your team. Since FinCEN has released the Real Estate Report form, we recommend starting internal dry runs of the process using it and the buyer and seller information collection forms.
- Have the reporting person (likely your title agent) complete a Real Estate Report Form based on a real, recent transaction, using either mock data or consumer-provided information.
- Don’t submit the form yet. This is purely a practice run.
- Use the experience to identify gaps in your process and train your team accordingly.
This dry run will help teams become fluent with the new reporting motion before the March deadline.
What to Expect from Qualia
We’re actively developing features in Qualia that will support compliance with the new FinCEN rule. In Qualia Core, the solution will enable users to track FinCEN-eligible transactions across their pipeline and collect and manage the necessary data for reporting. Resware customers will be able to use the platform’s powerful existing features, including workflow configuration, database queries, and reporting to meet these new requirements.
Our solutions will be completed before the reporting changes go into effect.
Click below to talk to a Qualia Specialist about automation built directly into Qualia.
