CRE Title Firms Turn To AI To Fill Talent Gaps, Speed Transactions

An often overlooked corner of commercial real estate is being pushed into reinvention, as the title insurance industry works to counter a shrinking, aging workforce and rising pressure to move faster in an increasingly complex market.

The industry, whose job it is to ensure that properties are free of financial and legal issues when they trade hands, is struggling to recruit a new generation of workers, setting up a labor shortage and a knowledge gap. To address the problem, it is embracing artificial intelligence.

“The fact is we are an obscure little industry that doesn't attract a lot of people, and then you have an aging population, so the number of people in the workforce are going down, and the number of people in this industry are going down,” said Pat Stone, founder of Williston Financial Group, a title firm with offices throughout the western U.S.

Roughly 96,000 people were employed as title insurers or abstractors in residential and commercial real estate in 2025, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The number is a slight uptick from the previous year but an 11% drop from 2021, when 107,000 people worked in the profession. 

While title companies don’t often generate headlines, the work they do — typically working for lawyers to verify prior owners and financial details of properties and insuring against that information — remains crucial. 

The industry is also incredibly concentrated. The big firms, including First National Title Group, Fidelity National Title Insurance Co., Chicago Title Insurance, Commonwealth Land Title Insurance and Stewart Title Guaranty Co., handle an estimated 95% of the industry’s workload. 

While the residential side of title insurance tends to be a leading indicator of activity, because the industry picks up in anticipation of an increase in mortgage activity and home sales, commercial title insurance reflects the underlying confidence or uncertainty in the market, Stone said. 

Like others, he sees this moment as one of the most uncertain in his 50-year career, as CRE as a whole contends with contentious politics, a shifting office landscape and an uneasy economic picture.

Title insurers are using AI to add efficiencies to their workflow and cut down on the time spent on more tedious aspects of the business, according to Jeff Lanier, vice president of financial planning and analysis at Stewart Title.

“Search, review and risk flagging are already being automated, which will reduce costs and timelines,” said Center for Real Estate Technology & Innovation Managing Director Ashkán Zandieh. “However, title insurance exists because of fragmented, inconsistent historical records and the need to transfer legal risk. That doesn’t disappear with better technology.”

But there have also long been informational silos between the three parties typically involved — lenders, brokers and title insurance — which slows the process, Stone said. It’s something technology could help play a role in fixing. 

Like other industries, title companies do need to exercise caution when incorporating AI into their work. The concern right now is less about AI replacing title insurers and more about privacy and the quality of the work product, according to the American Land Title Association.

Agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are scrutinizing chatbots for potential consumer harm and have urged title firms and others to make sure humans still get the last word.

While AI might speed up document research and title chains, industry members believe it won’t ultimately replace the need for humans to work out the intricacies of liens and loans. 

“If you don't have the experience, you have no idea what you're reviewing,” Proper Title Chief Operating Officer Kathy Kwak said. “Unless you understand what a chain of title means, unless you understand what a lien means or can decipher a handwritten document from the 1800s, you need an expert.” 

Kwak pointed to a current transaction under review involving an Illinois university. The property record remains extremely fragmented and confusing, and the attorneys are struggling to piece together property history and information about all the parts of the larger campus. For instance: Who owns alleys and parking lots, and how do you fill in blanks in the property ownership records that stretch back decades? 

Often, property records are nothing more than paperwork stored in dusty corners of a county courthouse. In rare cases, title insurance agents need to go back decades to decipher faded records that may just have owners' names and plot numbers instead of contemporary addresses. 

Tech firms have begun to see opportunities in helping to digitize and make local property records more accessible. There’s currently a perfect storm for this kind of work, according to Gregg Lester, co-CEO and president of Balcony, a firm helping build modern data infrastructure for the more than 3,000 county offices maintaining land records across the nation.

At the same time that AI and machine learning have made it easier to digitize and analyze written documents at scale, counties are seeing a rise in deed fraud for residential owners and even ransomware attacks, increasing the need for digital security. A 2022 ransomware attack in Suffolk County shut down the clerk’s office for weeks, closing off commercial real estate transactions.

“The title industry will always be critical and an important part of the real estate transaction,” Lester said. “The work that we're doing is going to make it so that the title industry can just do their job quicker and more accurately.