Why Most Title Companies Have No ROI Number Before Their First Automation Conversation

Written by:

Heather Hook

Date:

24 Jun 2026

KeyCrew Studio

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Most title companies that reach out about automation have a clear sense that something in their operation is taking too long or costing too much. What they rarely have is a number. No cost-per-transaction figure. No estimate of how many staff hours go into a given process each month. No projection of what it would cost over two years to keep doing it manually.

Jimmy Lewis, CEO & Co-founder of TrueFocus Automation, says this is almost universal. Prospects come into the first conversation focused on the problem. The math comes later, and it usually surprises them.

The Number They Do Not Know They Are Missing

“Most clients don’t go through the ROI,” Lewis says. “They don’t even have the process well documented. They don’t necessarily know what they’re paying per transaction to get this work done.”

That is not a criticism. It reflects how operations are typically managed in the title industry. Processes get divided across staff, layered into existing workflows, and handled by people who are too busy running the business to stop and calculate what each step actually costs. The inefficiency is visible. The dollar figure is not.

What TrueFocus does in a discovery conversation is build that number from the ground up. The starting point is always the same: who is doing the work today, how many people, how long does it take, and what does that person actually cost the business when you include benefits, taxes, and overhead?

The industry average TrueFocus uses for a fully loaded staff cost is $32/hour. That single figure, applied to a process that takes two or three hours per day across a team, often produces a monthly cost number the client has never seen before.

What Happens When the Projection Appears

The reaction Lewis describes is consistent. Once a prospect sees what the current process costs annually alongside what automation would cost to build and maintain, the conversation shifts.

“They are definitely very pleasantly surprised,” he says. “Most people hear ‘technology’, and they’re going off their past experiences, thinking this is going to be quite expensive. A hundred thousand, half a million, a million dollars. That’s kind of what they have in their mind.”

The actual numbers look very different. A bot built at TrueFocus averages around $9,500. Annual maintenance runs between $8,000 and $10,000. For a process that occupies at least half of one full-time employee, the investment typically returns itself within two to three months.

“When they see that they can get their investment back in two to three months, I mean, for us, we think it’s a no-brainer,” Lewis says.

The ROI presentation TrueFocus delivers does not just show the build cost. It includes infrastructure requirements, any software licensing, hosting fees, and the choice between internal maintenance and managed service. Every line item is laid out before any commitment is made. You can get an early estimate using the ROI calculator on the TrueFocus website.

Why the Cost Assumption Problem Matters

The gap between what prospects expect automation to cost and what it actually costs at TrueFocus has a real consequence: companies delay.

They assume the conversation is going to end with a proposal that does not fit their budget, so they do not have the conversation. Or they come in without the internal cost data needed to evaluate the investment clearly, which means the discussion stays abstract.

Lewis notes that TrueFocus operates differently from larger IT consultancies, which often require minimum annual engagements in the $200,000 to $300,000 range. “We kind of work at the client’s pace,” he says. “If we do good work at a good price and they see the value, they’re going to continue to come back.”

The Two-Year View Changes the Entire Decision

One of the most useful pieces of the ROI presentation is the two-year comparison. On one side: the cumulative cost of continuing to handle the process manually, including staff time, errors, and overhead. On the other: the cost of building, deploying, and maintaining a bot over the same period.

For companies with consistent monthly volume, the build-and-own model produces clear savings after a few months in most cases. After that, the savings compound. The staff time that was absorbed by the manual process gets redirected to work that requires human judgment.

Lewis says the clients who walk away from that presentation without moving forward are usually not doing so because the math did not work. It is more often because they have existing vendor relationships they are not ready to change, or because they are mid-process on something else internally. The ROI is not the obstacle. The timing is.

That is a very different problem from the budget. And it is one that gets resolved a lot faster once a title company sees what the numbers look like on paper.

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 based on information provided by the expert source cited above. It is intended for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or real estate advice. Readers should conduct their own research and consult qualified professionals before making any real estate or financial decisions.

Disclosure: Individuals or companies mentioned may have a commercial relationship with KeyCrew.