Best Practices Manual is Not a Rotisserie Oven

 

By Nancy Gusman and David Townsend

Ron Popeil was famous for selling his rotisserie ovens with the catch phrase, “Set it, and forget it!” If you do that with your ALTA Best Practices Manual, you are destined for failure. ALTA Best Practices was designed as a program to demonstrate evidence of a complaint environment. This in ongoing process, not a snapshot in time.

Lenders require a certain level of compliance from their vendors. Not just today, tomorrow, or next week, but as long as they are doing business with you. The expectation is that they could walk in unannounced, pick up your Best Practices Manual, and do a spot check of your procedures and see how you are doing. If you are not doing this yourself, then you should implement a program to review and update your procedures. Also, staff training is critical to making sure that what you set up actually gets done.

It is critical to perform evaluations on your policies and procedures to insure that they are being followed, and that they are still valid. It is worse to have procedures and not follow them, than to not have any at all. So now that you have your Best Practices Manual, what do you do with it?

First, we would recommend that you attend “Aligning to Comply” at the ALTA Annual Convention in October. We will present an Engagement Lab that will help you set expectations with your staff and implement training to insure that compliance is a focus. We will have an interactive discussion on how to take the next step in your evolution as a compliant title company. Join us to lean how you can maintain evidence of a complaint environment after you have established your Best Practices policies and procedures.

Nancy Gusman NTP is the owner of Brick House Title LLC. She can be reached at [email protected]. David Townsend NTP is CEO of Agents National Title insurance Company. He can be reached at [email protected]. Gusman and Townsend will speak more in depth about this topic during a session titled "Aligning to Comply" during ALTA's Annual Convention. Click here to register.