One of the strategies:
Strategy No. 4: Comparison shop for title and settlement services
If you’re going to shop for title and settlement service providers, move quickly. These firms require time for research and preparing documents.
The companies your lender recommends might be good deals. Perhaps your lender negotiated a volume discount, or knows a particular company’s service is outstanding, Martin says. But do your own online research and ask friends and family for referrals.
You can generate competing quotes on online marketplaces. On Austin, Texas-based TitleClose.com, for instance, companies pay a $325 annual fee to be listed. Shoppers enter information about their property and mortgage, including address, price, property type, closing date, whether there’s a mortgage and, if so, for how much.
Searching in a city yields around 25 to 40 itemized quotes; searching a smaller town delivers roughly a dozen, says Cara Ogrodowski, TitleClose vice president. You can rank your quotes by price, distance or customer ratings and learn average fees in your community for your loan amount, among other details.
How much can you save here? Possibly hundreds of dollars, Ogrodowski says. Bear in mind that potential savings vary by location since each state’s insurance regulations affect prices differently.