If Your Tech Stack Isn’t Fully Optimized, You’re At A Major Disadvantage In A Tumultuous Market

There is nothing more excruciating to a title agency owner than the uncertainty engendered by a chaotic and unpredictable economic environment.

Welcome to 2025, where continued economic volatility and the prospect of a recession continue to exert their impact on real estate markets. On the upside, employment numbers have remained steady, and housing inventory has begun to normalize at four months’ supply, offering hope for a strong buy/sell season before year’s end.

The unknown factor in this volatile situation is how willing consumers will be to purchase a home. 

With little data available to accurately predict the future of this market, title agency owners must focus on the factors they can control, such as improving internal performance, profitability and market share, all of which can be strengthened by optimizing every aspect of their tech stacks.

What does it mean to optimize your tech stack?

Optimizing one’s tech stack involves taking a thorough inventory of the business’ existing technology to ensure its systems are functioning at peak levels for purposes of ensuring:

• Systems and software are adequate to meet business objectives
• Production staff have the ability to seamlessly conduct the work of the agency
• Data is accurate and accessible for business forecasting and building market share 
• Security systems are up to date and closely monitored for maximum safety

Here are five areas for agents to tackle to ensure their firms are operating at greatest efficiency to meet the uncertainties ahead.

Maximize functionality

The first task on the tech stack to do list is to conduct a thorough inventory. Identifying and removing outdated or obsolete technology that is either no longer being used or is highly dysfunctional can immediately lighten the load within your systems. Getting rid of old tech can also provide some cost savings if 1) you are still paying for a service contracts or 2) your staff is spending time and energy on updates or patches for little used software.

One of the most effective strategies you can invoke in the current era of vastly complex tech stacks is to identify where you can connect systems through gap technology to more effectively streamline the work of your agency.

Your staff can elucidate this issue for you, identifying the dozen or more software systems they are hopping in and out of throughout the day to transfer and consolidate information as they work through a title file. Building bridges between systems with a common entry point or dashboard can save your staff endless time and reduce errors that are more likely to occur when transferring data manually. And this is precisely where artificial intelligence (AI) is already starting to deliver truly remarkable benefits to the title insurance industry. 

More specifically, agentic AI – the ability to read complex data, make decisions and take action – is being used to help title agents automate much of the workflow within their operations, providing greater accuracy and efficiency in the process. It’s also eliminating the often-underestimated amount of time and resources poured into transferring data from one technology to another part of the tech stack on a daily basis.

Value and perfect your data

The potential for AI in the title industry provides the perfect segue to touch on another aspect of your tech stack that needs a little attention and that is the quality of the data that underpins the work you do.

The primary message here is that to move into the future of technology that will be driven by AI (a future that is arriving now), you must learn to value your data to a much greater degree. This includes the following:

• Devoting resources to cleaning your data by removing duplications or outdated information and normalizing how data is entered
• Backing up your data routinely and ensuring you have robust security measures in place to protect it
• Archiving old data to free up space

Mine your data

The most important way to value your data is to use it.

Data is a golden resource, that if mined regularly, can help businesses make critical decisions not only to reduce costs, but to forecast with greater accuracy, expand market share through more sophisticated targeted marketing, and take action based on more insightful market trends.

Accurate and robust data can also be a regular source of information for internal management of resources, as well as external management of third-party services.

Install security and performance updates

Enough cannot be said about the importance of strict attention to security and performance updates of all systems.

In a challenging market, title agencies should be looking for high productivity within the agency and consistently updating systems is going to contribute to a greater level of efficiency across all departments.

On the security front, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center’s (IC3) 2024 report, released in April, points once again to the critical importance of having the most robust security measures in place. Cybercrime complaints rose more than 30% compared to 2023, while losses hit $16.6B, with business email compromise still representing a significant portion of those losses.

Don’t forget the hardware

Agency owners sometimes get hyper focused on the software programs their staff utilizes to accomplish the complex work of a title agency while the hardware itself is often overlooked.

Conduct an annual inventory of your network hardware, making sure you have the server bandwidth you need to keep up with the demands of your agency, as well as the necessary routers, firewalls, switches, modems, VPN gateways and so on. Up-to-date hardware ensures greater reliability across the entire IT network and offers improved security as well.

There is a tendency to think of technology as a tool or resource that helps agency owners manage the work of the agency, but technology is really a primary pillar, in the same way people, the service or product, the culture, and leadership are primary pillars.

Title agency owners that value their tech stack in the same way they value the other elements of their agency are far more likely to come out ahead in a tenuous market.

Hoyt Mann is the President & Co-Founder of alanna.ai.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of HousingWire’s editorial department and its owners.

To contact the editor responsible for this piece: zeb@hwmedia.com.