The critical business decision for any title company is the “Closing Snack.”  When you bring together buyers and sellers for a closing, the most important thing to do is make sure they are fed.  Years ago title companies starting baking fresh cookies for closings. As an owner of a title company this was a major problem for me because I always ate all of...

OK, these words are not entirely accurate.  Some homes won’t sell…  You’ve always got those sellers out there that think they can ask any price.  Case in point:  there is  home in my neighborhood that’s been on and off the market for more than 6 years. I’ve seen some nutty high prices out there and some junky houses, but those homes are...

Too many thunderstorms this Summer!  For our labrador and french bull dog, the storms are no big deal, just more yawning and napping.  The poodle, Blue, is an entirely different story.  He’s driven mad by thunderstorms and it’s gotten much worse with his advanced age. A few weeks ago we arrived home after some thunderstorms to discover that this dog had...

Several months ago I was approached with the idea of helping to launch a new title company.  Let me put this into context by rewinding a few years:  I launched Vista Title Company back in 2002, grew it to be a successful company over the succeeding 7 years and then sold it to another independent title company in Denver.  When I sold Vista, most of the Vista...

Historically the upturns and downturns in the mountain real estate market lag behind Denver by a couple of years.  We’ve seen some massive recovery in Denver over the last few years and we’re now seeing strong recovery in many of the mountain resort areas. The chart below is pulled from the Your Castle report prepared specifically for mountain...

Walmart has its purpose.  I’m all about spending less on day-to-day things, but when it comes to important things, don’t go cheap.  In just the past couple of weeks I’ve seen two separate real estate title problems caused by “going cheap.”  These are so similar that I couldn’t help but blog about them. The first issue involved a...