What You Don’t Know Can Cost You: Inside Title Insurance, Fraud Prevention & Protecting Property Rights with Bill O’Connell

All right, welcome back to A Seat at the Table with me and Betsy.

We have a very special guest today, William O'Connell.

How we doing, Will?

Awesome.

And obviously we know who he's with and who he's representing here.

Because he

always...

I refer to Bill in two ways.

To me, he's Billy-O.

And then he's also William.

Because every time I call him, the first thing I say is, William.

And what do you say, Bill?

Bradley? Bradley?

What's going on? This is what we're doing today.

What's going on in the streets? But for those of you who don't know Bill...

Bill is the Mid-Atlantic Underwriting Counsel for Fidelity National Financial, and they're a family of companies.

And if you don't know what an underwriter does or underwriting counsel does, we're going to cover some of that today.

Because I think I'd like to uncover some of this for our listeners to understand what a day in the life of an underwriting counsel is.

I think a lot of people have a difficult time understanding title insurance generally.

And it's a topic that I think more people, even if they are educated enough, and I can vouch for one thing.

I know Bill very well.

He's a good friend of mine.

We are going to make this entertaining because most people don't want to listen to about title insurance because they just drone it out.

But if you if you listen today and you can stick it through with us on this, we're going to talk real world stuff and we're going to talk real world understanding certain parts of the title insurance industry that I don't think people understand enough.

And it's really that you have to be an expert in it.

You just have to know to say, you should have a conversation with the experts about this to make sure that you're being protected and educated about your largest, generally largest financial investment in people's lives.

I also think sometimes agents, when they say, we have to say to them, well, we got to check with our underwriter.

Or you're looked at maybe sometimes as a bad guy.

Our underwriter won't let us do that.

Our underwriter won't let us insure our underwriter.

Well, it's okay.

And

then I think they sometimes get the feeling of like, oh, like this person up there.

Who's

behind the curtain.

Yes, exactly.

So I'm sorry to say sometimes there's a bad impression.

right in the world in terms of what you do.

So you need to reverse that bill and give everyone a

good impression.