States Title, a digital closing startup, on Thursday debuted a new closing disclosure product that it says can significantly speed up the process of closing on a home.
The company calls the new product Instant Closing Disclosure. According to a statement from States Title, it uses “machine intelligence” to automatically process closing settlement documents and send them from escrow officers to lenders in as little as one minute. Normally, the statement adds, that process can take hours or days and is sometimes prone to errors because human closing agents have to pore over the documents.
Max Simkoff
In the statement, States Title CEO Max Simkoff drew a contrast between his company’s new product and the conventional closing process, which he said “costs too much, takes too long, and is too confusing.”
“Instant Closing Disclosure eliminates manual processes and reduces touch points,” he added, “while ensuring high standards of accuracy, improving the experience for both lenders and consumers.”
Instant Closing Disclosure specifically uses technology to extract and interpret information from closing documents, identify discrepancies and automatically generate a closing disclosure, among other things. It also uses an algorithm to understand natural language and is platform agnostic, meaning it should be compatible with whatever software a lender happens to be using.
The debut of Instant Closing Disclosure comes about five months after States Title announced that it had raised $123 million in a Series C funding round. At that time, Simkoff said real estate was in the midst of “an unprecedented shift” as technology reshapes the homebuying and selling process.
Simkoff founded States Title in 2016. It’s one of a handful of companies that are working to streamline the closing process, which has remained stubbornly byzantine even as other parts of the real estate experience went digital and became more consumer friendly. Other companies such as Qualia and Notarize have also spent years trying to modernize various aspects of the closing experience.
In its statement Thursday, States Title said it is working with “some of the U.S.’s largest mortgage lenders, including Home Point Financial.” And Home Point Financial president and CEO Willie Newman added in the statement that Instant Closing Disclosure, along with other States Title products are helping his company “provide customers with a mortgage experience that is simple, straightforward, data-driven, and can be completed quickly.”