On October 8, Qualia announced an expanded partnership with Compass during The Future Is Now, along with new platform capabilities designed to help title & escrow companies do their work, manage escrow payments, and run their businesses, all from one platform they can trust.  Here’s what we shared and how we’re building it with you.

Watch The Future Is Now.

For most of your clients, closing on a home is the biggest financial transaction of their lives. For your team, it’s one of dozens of files on the desk, and every one carries that same weight.

That’s the responsibility title & escrow companies carry every day. And the job is only getting harder.

Fraudsters are finding increasingly sophisticated ways to steal your clients’ funds. At the same time, expectations for the closing experience are changing. Clients want instant answers, real-time visibility, and simple and secure ways to move money. 

At The Future Is Now on October 8, we showed how Qualia is helping title & escrow companies to not just keep up, but to deliver beyond those expectations. 

For Nate Baker, Qualia’s CEO and Co-Founder, the goal is making technology that works inside a title & escrow business so your team gets real time back and your clients get a better closing experience. “Qualia’s sole job over the next 12 months is solving this problem,” he said. “How do we get frontier intelligence into your business instantly in a way that you can trust?”

Building on a foundation of trust

Point solution vendors are increasingly announcing new AI, fraud, or payments tools in title & escrow. That’s good for the industry, but it makes one question matter more than any feature list: who do you trust to bring this technology into your business?

We believe the answer starts with where new technology lives. Qualia is the system of record for thousands of companies across the country, where orders, documents, communication, and funding all live in one place. That means new tools aren’t bolted on from the outside. They work from the same file your team works in, follow your rules, and leave a record of what they did.

AI is the clearest example of the single platform benefit. “You can audit every single action happening in the system, in a way which is only possible because we are the system of record,” Baker explained. “Your workflows and your work happen in Qualia, so it’s easy for us to adapt to the way you work and not force you into some other path.” 

A single platform is only the start. We’ve made it our mission to be a partner who knows title & escrow from the inside and applies technology practically in the market. “We’ve been doing this for a decade, and we have many people within our company that have run the biggest title companies in the country,” Baker shared.

That’s part of the reason why companies like Compass International Holdings, which has some of the largest real estate brokerages in the country, decided to expand its existing partnership with Qualia. We have already worked together for years. Following the company’s merger with Anywhere Real Estate, Compass International Holdings will bring its title operations from across its companies onto Qualia, replacing the separate systems the combined organization inherited, and increasing Qualia’s footprint across its title companies more than fivefold.

“I don’t think there’s anybody we could navigate this next stage with that isn’t Qualia.”

— Cory Perkins, President of Integrated Services at Compass International Holdings

At The Future Is Now, we shared more on that partnership, plus our latest releases and what’s coming next to help you do the work, move the money, and run the business. 

Do the work: AI works for you

“Today, title companies spend half their time out in the field winning new business, and half their time actually doing the work,” Baker said. “I think that mix is going to shift a lot over the coming year.” When AI has all the context of your business and has been built to work side by side with you, it can do work for you. Qualia Clear now takes on complex work across the file. In the last few months alone, Qualia Clear has added the ability to:

  • Draft emails in your voice: Qualia Clear now drafts replies using file context and a personalized writing style guide so clients get the information they need from you the way you want it worded. By reviewing and sending drafts pre-written for them, some Qualia customers have automated up to 70% of their email correspondence. With that, teams can reply to clients three times faster.
  • Open orders faster: Qualia Clear’s improved Order Opener opens the order in under five minutes by reading contract details, extracting more data fields, and reducing manual data entry.
  • Clear title requirements: Specialized Curative Agents automatically start doing the work to clear title requirements, saving proof of their findings in the Documents section of the file. The Agents act as a virtual employees to:
    • Look up taxes on county websites and calculate prorations
    • Verify entity status with the Secretary of State
    • Coming soon -Collect payoff authorizations and statements 
    • Coming soon – Confirm releases are recorded on time, and draft lender follow-ups if not.
  • Perform file quality assurance checks: Before and after closing, Qualia Clear checks every document, signature, and notary stamp so your team can catch errors early and fix them before they cause issues.

“I would say conservatively, 90% of the manual input has disappeared.”

— Chase Reno, CEO at Knoxville Title

Everything Qualia Clear produces comes back as a draft for your team to review, the same way a colleague’s work would. At Eagle Title in Annapolis, Maryland, Qualia Clear flagged a problem in a 35-year-old abstract that could have resulted in a title claim down the road. Three other examiners had missed it on prior transactions. The examiner at Eagle Title was able to catch it and the team cleared it through curative before closing.

Move the money: a modern and secure way to pay

Qualia Shield has long helped protect title & escrow teams from wire fraud. Earlier this year, we expanded Shield to run verifications automatically on every transaction, with no manual steps. Fraud protection should be on by default, and with Shield it is.

But protecting the money is only half the job. We also believe how it moves should be improved for your clients and your buyers, who are nervous and looking to you for two things: certainty and a frictionless payment experience.

“Buyers can tap their phone to pay for coffee,” said Jackson Reynolds, Qualia’s Chief Strategy Officer, “but then reach a closing and have to figure out how to wire their life savings, often it being the the first time they’ve sent a wire. For you, checks arrive by mail, wire instructions go out over email, and every dollar has to get matched by hand between your bank and your title production software.”

Qualia is in a unique position to change that. “We’ve built the system you close in and already connect to the banks that hold your escrow funds,” said Reynolds. That’s why we’re moving from protecting the money to also moving it. Two new products mark a new phase for Qualia’s fintech solutions:

  • Qualia EMD: Built directly into Core, with nothing to integrate and no extra login. Buyers send earnest money digitally, and funds land in Core as good funds, sometimes before the file is even open, and then post straight to the ledger. With an integrated bank partner, they reconcile to your escrow account on their own.
  • Qualia Cash to Close: Buyers will be able to make their cash to close payment in the same place they already verified their identity and paid earnest money, so they feel more confident sending their largest payment of the transaction. Confirmed good funds reach escrow within hours, and wire instructions never go out by email.

And these products are just the start. Next up: Disbursements, so you can pay out of escrow directly from Qualia and reconcile instantly.

“We’ve made a decision as an organization that we’re not accepting checks anymore. We’re only going to use EMD with Qualia. We’re a target for fraud so it’s a safer bet for me.”

—Jacob Webb, CEO at Level 10 Title

Run the business: the “have-to-dos” handled  

“There are things you want to do to run your business, and things you have to do,” said Brian Thome, Qualia’s Chief Customer Officer. “What gets you up in the morning? Filing 1099s or helping someone buy their first home?” These newly released features take on the have-to-dos so your team has more time for the relationships that power your business: 

  • 1099-S E-File: Review and file 1099-S returns from one dashboard in Qualia Core, with real-time validation. Qualia is now a transmitter and files on your behalf, so you don’t need your own Transmitter Control Code (TCC).
  • Duplicate contact merging: Find and combine duplicate contacts while keeping order history intact, so your payee information and reporting stay accurate.
  • AI Smart Tag Assistant (coming soon): The assistant reads your documents and recommends the smart tags that fill them in, so you get documents you trust without the setup.
  • AI Support Assistant (launched earlier this year): Located at the bottom right of every screen, it answers your team’s questions in seconds with full context of the file and the Qualia Knowledge Base. 
  • Connect Concierge (coming soon): Just as the support assistant gives your team instant answers, your clients will get answers to simple questions inside Qualia Connect, at any hour, so they’re not waiting on you.

How Qualia and its customers are building the future of title & escrow together

Everything we shared at The Future Is Now reflects how fast the technology landscape is changing and what Qualia is doing to keep our users ahead of the curve. “Our engineers are shipping 10 times more code than they were 12 months ago,” Baker said. Because it all lives in one platform, new capabilities reach your team as soon as they ship.

Over the next year, that pace will change what it means to run a title & escrow company. You can give clients accurate answers in a fraction of the time. The data entry, document processing, and email back-and-forth that fill the day today can be handled by Qualia Clear, with your team reviewing the work. What replaces the time spent on that is a different level of customer engagement. “More and more of the work is going to be out in the field with the customer, improving the relationship, handling concerns and the complicated edge cases,” Baker said. 

Eagle Title is already heading there. The company has run on Qualia since 2018, and Brad Walsh, its President, regularly shares ideas with the Qualia team. For Walsh, it’s all building toward a title company oriented around its clients. “The modern title company for me is really about embracing technology in a way that you can then supplement it by creating additional human interaction,” he said. “We can have conversations that humanize the experience and really get to the base of what the consumers are looking for.”

That shared client centric experience is exactly what Qualia is working towards with companies on the platform. “It’s shifting from a system that you work on to one that does work for you, so that you can focus on the relationships that matter,” said Charlotte Brown, Qualia’s VP of Product & Design. “We think of ourselves at Qualia as your trusted partner, working alongside you to make your business successful.”

We’re proud to be on this journey with you. The future is now.

See it for yourself

  • Watch on demand: See The Future Is Now, including customer stories and Nate’s conversation with Cory Perkins of Compass.
  • Talk with your Qualia representative: Find out which releases are available for your team today.
  • Visit us at ALTA ONE: Stop by booth #47 to see these releases in person.