American Land Title Association – Title Insurance and Settlement Company Best Practices

ALTA seeks to guide its membership on best practices to protect consumers, promote quality service, provide for ongoing employee training, and meet legal and market requirements.  These practices are voluntary and designed to help members illustrate to consumers and clients the industry’s professionalism and best practices to ensure a positive and compliant real estate settlement experience. These best practices are not intended to encompass all aspects of title or settlement company activity.

ALTA is publishing these best practices as a benchmark for the mortgage lending and real estate settlement industry. ALTA seeks comments from stakeholders as the Association seeks to continually improve these best practices. A formal committee of ALTA members will regularly review and make improvements to these best practices, seeking comment on each revision.

1. Best Practice: Establish and maintain current license(s) as required to conduct the business of title insurance and settlement services.

2. Best Practice: Adopt and maintain appropriate written procedures and controls for Escrow Trust Accounts allowing for electronic verification of reconciliation.

3. Best Practice: Adopt and maintain a written privacy and information security plan to protect Non-public Personal Information as required by local, state and federal law.

4. Best Practice: Adopt standard real estate settlement procedures and policies that ensure compliance with Federal and State Consumer Financial Laws as applicable.

5. Best practice: Adopt and maintain written procedures related to title policy production, delivery, reporting and premium remittance.

6. Best Practice: Maintain appropriate professional liability insurance and fidelity coverage.

7. Best Practice: Adopt and maintain procedures for resolving consumer complaints.

As part of our commitment to ALTA’s Best Practices, we encourage our customers to contact us with their compliments and complaints. Please use the “Leave a Reply” feature below to reach our customer service department. We are committed to responding to all comments within two business days.