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Speed of Automation Deployment May Determine Whether Title Companies Retain or Lose High-Volume Clients
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Date:
02 Sep 2026
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In title operations, the pace of automation deployment can shape how a client relationship grows. Two projects from TrueFocus Automation‘s history illustrate the point, according to Jimmy Lewis: one involving a large amount of e-recording volume, the other a compressed title plant build with a firm deadline. In both cases, the time between discovery and deployment directly shaped how well the client retained the work.
When Volume Becomes an Opportunity
A TrueFocus client had taken on a project involving roughly 140,000 documents that needed to be e-recorded. The volume was large enough that automation offered a clear advantage over a fully manual approach within the required timeframe, making it possible for the client to deliver the full scope themselves rather than sharing it with additional vendor partners.
The TrueFocus team started by processing documents manually to map the workflow, then pivoted. “Within a week or so, we thought, hey, this is ideal for us to maybe leverage some RPA to automate the workflow,” Lewis says.
By handing off roughly eight minutes of document processing to automation, the manual touch times fell to single-minute averages, drastically shortening the project completion time.
“Instead of our client potentially giving up some of that project because they maybe get it done quick enough, our use of automation kept a 2nd or 3rd vendor partner out of the picture,” Lewis says. “We were able to keep all that work in-house for them and automate that and get the work done using RPA.”
In title operations, large-volume assignments are often won on demonstrated capacity. A client who can absorb a 140,000-document volume while keeping the work under one roof is an especially attractive partner. In this case, automation speed functioned as a direct competitive advantage.
A Ten-Month Window and a $55,000-Plus Cost Advantage
The second project Lewis describes involved a title company in the Midwest that had a ten-month window to build its own title plant. Title plant construction, which involves downloading property records, extracting data, and formatting it for future retrieval, is, as Lewis puts it, “really tedious, monotonous, time-consuming.” Automation made it possible to complete the work at the required scale within the available timeframe at a fraction of the manual cost.
TrueFocus deployed five or six bots running more than twenty hours a day for an eight-month period. The total cost came in at approximately $75,000.
“We estimated if they had offshored that to a BPO partner, it’d be roughly about $130,000 to $140,000, maybe even higher than that,” Lewis says, a cost difference of at least $55,000 to $65,000, and potentially more depending on the partner.
The comparison to offshore labor matters because offshoring has historically been a common cost-reduction strategy for high-volume, repetitive title work. According to Lewis, domestic automation deployed quickly and at scale can match or beat offshore pricing while keeping work under direct operational control, a benefit for data security, quality oversight, and turnaround consistency.
What Standard Implementation Timelines Look Like
Lewis describes TrueFocus’s standard development cycle as four to five weeks from initial scoping to deployment, though complexity can extend that to eight to twelve weeks. The process begins with a thirty-minute to one-hour discovery call, followed by a proposal within three to four days. Once a client approves, a week of documentation with business analysts feeds into two to three weeks of development, with a final week reserved for user acceptance testing before the bot goes live.
Both the e-recording and title plant projects benefited from compressing portions of that timeline down to about a week to meet client deadlines. Lewis says the ability to accelerate, rather than follow a rigid multi-month deployment schedule, is what allowed the firm to capture the business value in both cases.
For title companies evaluating automation vendors, deployment speed is worth making an explicit part of the selection conversation, according to Lewis. A vendor who can articulate a realistic timeline from discovery to live deployment, and who can flex to project complexity, is well positioned to respond when business conditions call for fast action.
Jimmy Lewis is the CEO & Co-Founder of TrueFocus Automation, a specialist in RPA (robotic process automation) and AI-driven workflow automation for the title insurance, mortgage, and real estate industries. TrueFocus has developed 840+ automation bots supporting more than 2,500 workflows and has returned over 1.3 million production hours to clients.
This article is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or investment advice. The views and opinions expressed herein reflect those of the individuals quoted and do not represent an endorsement of any company, product, or service mentioned. Readers should conduct their own due diligence and consult qualified professionals before making any investment decisions.
Disclosure: Individuals or companies mentioned may have a commercial relationship with KeyCrew.
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