Fathom Holdings, the parent company of cloud-based brokerage Fathom Realty, has acquired North Carolina-based title insurance company Verus Title for an undisclosed sum, according to an announcement released Thursday.
Fathom expects to complete the acquisition before year’s end, and will retain Verus Title’s management team that includes founder and CEO Paul Yurashevich.
Joshua Harley
“Adding Verus Title to Fathom Holdings should give our agents yet another competitive advantage that enables them to serve consumers with additional, cost-effective services, while increasing revenue per transaction,” Fathom CEO Joshua Harley said in a press release. “Verus will serve as our branded title and settlement solution, bringing greater value to all of our stakeholders.”
“The transaction represents a perfect example of the kind of vertical integration that should allow us to continue our growth trajectory,” he added.
The acquisition of Verus Title comes on the heels of Fathom Holdings July initial public offering, where the company was able to raise $31.9 million. In an online presentation before the IPO, Harley said the funds would be used to expand Fathom’s offerings to include mortgage and title services.
Available in 19 states, Verus is a technology-based residential real estate title insurance provider that directly works with real estate brokerages and lenders to create branded title and settlement solutions. On the consumer side, Verus offers an online and mobile platform to process titles, along with e-signature or remote signature services in select markets.
Paul Yurashevich
“Verus Title’s mission has always been to enhance the process of completing a home purchase by enabling agents, as well as lenders, to serve clients in new, more highly efficient ways through the use of technology,” Yurashevich said of the acquisition. “We believe that being part of Fathom Holdings will enable us to rapidly grow our revenue and expand market penetration, as we bring greater value to agents, as well as to homebuyers and sellers.”
In an emailed statement to Inman, Harley explained Fathom has been planning to acquire a title company for several years and believed Verus, although small, had the reach and company culture needed to fit within the Fathom Holdings family.
“We’ve known for a long time that we wanted to acquire a title company, mortgage company, and even insurance,” Harley said. “Long before the IPO, we were evaluating several companies based on their size, offering, culture, and so forth, and we knew ahead of time who we wanted to approach after the IPO.”
“We were looking for an operation that shared our servant-first culture, our virtual approach to operations, and had licensing in many of our current markets,” he added. “We were focused on reach, not on how many clients they were currently servicing [since] we knew we could leverage our size to scale them up quickly.”
Harley said Fathom is dedicated to helping Verus complete its 2021 nationwide expansion by leveraging the relationships the company already has with some of the nation’s top underwriters, including WFG National Title, Stewart Title Underwriting, Fidelity and the Chicago Underwriting Group.
“As a public company, I don’t have the luxury of making bold predictions about our future or that of our subsidiaries,” he said of his hopes for the acquisition. “I can simply share that our immediate focus is to quickly roll out Verus Title in every market that Fathom serves.”
“As Fathom opens up new markets across the U.S., we will follow up by launching Verus in that market as well,” he added. “The same will be true when, or if, we acquire mortgage and insurance. Our long-term goal is to operate in all 50 states and Canada.”
Looking forward, Harley said his team is already planning ways to streamline the Verus platform and optimize the user experience for agents and consumers while keeping costs low.
“We believe we can bring more services and conveniences to our clients without the need or cost of excessive overhead,” he concluded. “To that end, we will be working with our developers to find new ways to further streamline Verus’s operations and services, as well as provide more value to our clients and our agents.”
