AmTrust Title Goes Above and Beyond to Close the Deal
Underwriting a resort in New England shouldn’t be that difficult, right? Wrong.
Debra Paoli, national senior vice president of Underwriting at New York City-based AmTrust Title Insurance Company (formerly First Nationwide Title), and her team faced multiple challenges: a mountain in the middle of the property; a surveyor who quit mid-project; multiple levels of financing and more.
“I was calling the county zoning person to track down documentation that was destroyed in a flood—the documents had been stored in the basement of a jail,” Paoli recalled.
Paoli negotiated an information swap, offering to share her research if the zoning official could track down the one document she needed. It worked, and the deal closed. But taking that extra step is just another day at the office (or more accurately, multiple offices around the country) for AmTrust Title, which provides title insurance and related services for all commercial property types. Its main goal: to close the transaction. The legal/underwriting team plays a vital role, noted Felice K. Shapiro, executive vice president and chief underwriter.
“The goal of the AmTrust Title Insurance Company legal/underwriting department is to fully support all of our agency underwriting teams without the creation of multiple layers of bureaucracy that exist in the other underwriters, thus allowing decisions to be made in a timelier manner. We believe that putting together teams of local highly qualified underwriters is beneficial to the clients, as well as protecting the company. AmTrust Title Insurance Company’s goal is to have highly qualified underwriters who are given the power to make decisions efficiently and quickly for the client,” Shapiro said.
Acting as detectives as much as underwriters, Paoli and her team will make the extra phone call to the clerk, and track down a release document no one else can find by going to the source. Last year, upon hearing an underwriter tell a client that getting a release document for an old mortgage was impossible, Paoli found a way—by tracking the source all the way back to Germany.
“AmTrust Title is a first-class operation that can not only meet a client’s national needs, but its global needs. As the lead underwriting counsel working alongside Deb Paoli and her team on the co-insurance of a globally recognized, world-class resort in the Bahamas, we were able to see that no task is too large or too small for us. We dug right in and helped both with U.S. counsel and Bahamian counsel wherever and however needed; AmTrust boasts a team with more than 15 years of international experience each,” says Edward Hamann, chief international underwriter and southeast regional counsel.
The financial support of parent AmTrust Financial Services, which acquired First Nationwide Title last year—only four years after it was founded by President Steven Napolitano, today has 100 transactions in the pipeline at any given time, a figure that changes daily. A deal that might be dormant one day can be active 24 hours later, Paoli notes. And the deals themselves vary in scope and complexity.
“We have the resources of our parent company, with offices all over the country,” said Jason Gordon, president of AmTrust, “which means we are equipped to guarantee title in all 50 states on AmTrust Title as well as via other underwriters.”
Building a reputation for getting the challenging deals done has resulted in significant growth for AmTrust’s national underwriting team, which regularly handles multisite transactions, working in 49 states.
“We’ve been working on multisite portfolios that cover multiple states, expanding from portfolios with five properties to much larger transactions containing as many as 30 or 40 sites. A recent transaction had more than 300 sites; these can cover up to 20 states,” she adds.
“We always had a national capability, but as we grow and more people become familiar with our team and our areas of expertise, we’re being given larger multisite opportunities,” Paoli observed, and added that AmTrust’s underwriting team includes an inordinate number of industry veterans.
Creating order out of chaos is a specialty for Paoli and her team, especially for multisite portfolios. The team ensures that information and documents flow continually. One especially large transaction required six team members and two closers for everyone to stay on top of the data, including 1,000 documents coming in to the office, all of which needed to be proofread, dated, scanned and distributed. In addition, AmTrust Title was working with eight different states and thus eight locals, plus the underwriters. The firm’s national reach—and a team who lost a lot of sleep that week—allowed the deal to close on time.
AmTrust Title’s reputation as a closer has spread, and the number of policies the firm has closed has doubled in the last year.
“We’re not a volume shop. It’s not the number of transactions we’re working on it’s the size of the deals that people are interested in. We handle everything from a single-site deal in Ohio to a 330-site portfolio deal across 15 states,” Gordon said. Some deals have exceeded $1 billion. “Only the highest-level institutional investors and attorneys are associated with the deals, and they are entrusting our company as one of a handful of companies that have the capacity and expertise to get the deals done. Given our ability to use multiple underwriters, there isn’t a limit to the size of a transaction we can’t manage.”
The firm assigns a team of professionals to each project so that anyone can answer a client’s questions if a colleague is unavailable. At least two or three people are working on a transaction at any given time, depending on its size. And by eliminating the bureaucracy that can slow down the process, AmTrust Title has streamlined underwriting. Anyone involved in the process can access information at any time through the use of proprietary software and old-fashioned communication.
“We always know exactly at which point in a title search the transaction stands,” Gordon said.
AmTrust Title is anticipating doubling its volume again, and is expanding with new offices in Washington, D.C., New Jersey, Texas, Florida, Arizona and in the Pacific Northwest, providing critical local and regional knowledge.
“There’s no doubt that having a corporate parent whose balance sheet includes $23 billion in assets enables us to expand and grow AmTrust Title,” said Steven Napolitano, executive vice president, who added that having received Certificates of Authority to operate in 31 states, AmTrust Title is well underway to meeting its goal of operating in all 50 states in the union. “Our ability to insure the largest real estate transactions in the U.S., plus being able to offer commercial coverage through local agents and direct offices in the Caribbean, Latin America and Europe, gives us a distinct competitive advantage over regional underwriters. We recognize that the real estate industry itself demands more capacity to handle bigger deals and by staffing AmTrust with the most experienced commercial underwriting staff in the industry, and by arming them with the most advanced technology, we are able as sophisticated service providers to meet that demand.”
“Texas title insurance regulations pose unique challenges for our commercial clients operating on a national scale. Our Texas operation specializes in servicing developers, lenders, and private equity firms in smoothly and efficiently closing the most complex and sophisticated commercial transactions throughout the state. Since opening our Texas office in 2014, we’ve grown into one of the largest agents in the state and continue to grow. We’ve tackled large scale projects ranging from multi-family residential development portfolios to downtown office towers to chemical plants,” said Mike Elkins, underwriting counsel.
“When a client says that closing a transaction is absolutely of prime importance, we call upon our arsenal of experts to accomplish that goal, always before deadline but very often in advance, since time is invariably of the essence,” Paoli said. “Our detective work is ongoing, it is the bedrock of ensuring free and clear title to every type of real estate asset imaginable.”
AmTrust Title Insurance Company
59 Maiden Lane, 43rd Floor
New York, NY 10038
www.amtrusttitlegroup.com
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