Qualia and Compass International Holdings are expanding their partnership to bring title & escrow across Compass Integrated Services’ companies onto Qualia. The expansion pairs Compass International Holdings, home to some of the largest real estate brokerages in the country, with the leading provider of AI-powered title, escrow, and real estate closing software.
Compass International Holdings serves millions of buyers and sellers through a portfolio of some of the most recognized and iconic brands: @properties, Better Homes and Gardens® Real Estate, CENTURY 21®, Christie’s International Real Estate, Coldwell Banker®, Compass, Corcoran®, ERA®, and Sotheby’s International Realty®, and its title & escrow operation is one of the largest in the United States.
The first Compass International Holdings title company of the expansion goes live on October 12, with additional companies set to follow over the course of 2027. When the rollout is complete, Qualia’s footprint across Compass Integrated Services’ title companies will have grown more than fivefold.
Cory Perkins, President of Integrated Services at Compass International Holdings, recently met with Qualia CEO Nate Baker in our Austin office to talk about the partnership. “We’re excited to have you as a partner. I don’t think there’s anybody we could navigate this next stage with that isn’t Qualia,” Perkins said.
Watch highlights from the conversation.
How did Compass get into title & escrow?
Compass spent years opening new markets for its brokerage, growing quickly through the country and developing a reputation as the technology forward brokerage. The team at Compass is innovative by nature, and after developing the core business, they started asking how else they could grow its business and improve its financial profile.
Perkins calls what came next the “LFR moment,” for “learn from reality”. They asked, “What are others doing to build their businesses in real estate?” The answer was title & escrow.
“Real estate is a team sport,” he said, “so it has to include title & escrow.”
Why did Compass prioritize one platform?
Compass learned early that title & escrow is a local business. For about five years, it bought title agencies market by market, choosing businesses its agents already loved. Each agency came with its own settlement software, and Perkins characterized the result as “a mix of different settlement software that folks were using.”
A mix of systems may work when each office stands alone, but it gets harder once they all belong to one company. Every system has its own way of opening a file, assigning tasks, and balancing escrow accounts. Two businesses under the same owner can handle the same transaction in two different ways, with no easy way to tell which approach works better or to spread it to the rest.
Reporting runs into the same wall. When each agency keeps its data in its own format, a basic question like how many files closed last month, or how long they took, turns into a manual project. Someone has to pull numbers from each system and reconcile them by hand. On one platform, the whole business works from the same records.
Real estate professionals and their clients feel the difference too. An agent who sells in two markets might work with two title teams on two systems, each with its own emails, portals, and documents. A shared platform gives every agency the same foundation, so the experience stays consistent while local teams keep the relationships that made them worth buying in the first place.
Then there’s every other system the business touches. Each settlement platform needs its own connection to brokerage tools, accounting, and outside vendors. With a dozen systems, every connection gets built and maintained a dozen times. On one platform, that work happens once. A connection to the brokerage, the accounting system, or an outside vendor gets built one time and works for every company in the portfolio.
When the team went looking to centralize their platform, they found Qualia, which Perkins described as “starting to do settlement software differently than anybody else had before.”
Moving to Qualia gave Compass something to build on. Its agents already spent their day in the Home Platform, Compass’s own workspace, but title & escrow historically happened in a different, disconnected workspace. So Compass put its own engineering behind connecting the two experiences. It built one-click title & escrow ordering on Qualia, so an agent can order title & escrow from the Home Platform and follow it to closing. Compass built it once, and every company on Qualia gets it. Agents who use it now attach title & escrow at roughly twice the rate of agents who don’t.
“We like to think of our real estate professionals as CEOs of their business. They should be out selling and growing their business, not worrying about the coordination on the back end,” shared Perkins.
How is Compass International Holdings approaching a migration this size?
Title & escrow companies will move in phases over the course of 2027, and each company’s timing will be set around its closing calendar. Perkins knows the migration touches the center of each team’s day. “We don’t want to mess with revenue. We don’t want to disrupt transactions,” he said.
Compass already has some title companies running on Qualia, so the teams that are next can learn from the ones that went first. “We’re bringing together a lot of disparate pieces,” Perkins said. “The good news is we have leaders that have done this work before and they are helping us along the way.”
He also wants to move quickly. “At the end of this there are a lot of opportunities for us, and I just want to get there as soon as we can.”
What will Qualia and Compass build together?
Perkins wants a national platform for its title & escrow companies across Compass International Holdings, with more consistent outcomes. “This is an opportunity to invest in technology for our title & escrow employees that I don’t think we’ve ever had as a business collectively,” he said.
Perkins expects buying and selling a home to look very different over the next five years. “They’re going to forget what it was like when they had to track documents across emails and worry about wire fraud,” he said.
“Compass International Holdings has some of the largest real estate brokerages in the country. You’ve been doing some incredible work this year, and we’re excited to support you and transform the industry,” said Baker.
