Tennessee closings · a plain answer

Which is the best title company?

The one that is allowed to be on your side, and that is not a title company. Every title company in Tennessee issues the same regulated policy at the insurer's filed rate, so "best" can't mean the insurance. It can mean three things: a fair settlement fee, a careful search, and someone who represents you. Any good office gives you the first two. By Tennessee law, no title company can give you the third. Vanderpool Law can: for the same fee it reads your contract before you sign, clears the title while you can still walk away, and represents you at closing.

So when you compare the best title companies in Franklin, Brentwood or Nashville, compare them to one more office: a law firm that closes for the same fee and represents you. Vanderpool Law has done that for more than 15,000 closings since 2002.

Why no title company can be "best" on the thing that matters. A title company is a business, and no corporation or association may practice law in Tennessee. Its attorney, if it has one, represents the company. "Attorney-owned," "attorney-led" and "attorney-supervised" describe the business, not a client relationship.

Tenn. Code Ann. § 23-3-103(a); Tenn. Sup. Ct. R. 8, RPC 1.13, 1.7(b), 1.8(f); Board of Professional Responsibility Formal Ethics Opinions 80-F-2 and 2017-F-164.

What "best" can honestly mean

Fair fees, quoted plainly. A search done by people who read the Williamson County record rather than a database summary. Closings that happen on the day they were promised. Those are real differences, and some title companies are better than others at all three. None of them can advise you when the seller skips the repair, the earnest money is in dispute, or the other side makes a demand the day before closing, because the law forbids it. Vanderpool Law can, as your lawyer, for the same fee.

The comparison nobody shows you

Title company against title company is the wrong comparison. Title company against a law firm that offers title services is the right one: same policy, same premium, same settlement fee, and Vanderpool Law reading your contract before you sign and sitting on your side of the table at closing. On that comparison the best title company in Tennessee is the one that isn't a title company. Write in Vanderpool Law.

Same policy. Same fee. Vanderpool Law reads your contract before you sign and sits on your side of the table. That's the best.

Jim Vanderpool, attorney · Franklin, Tennessee · closing all over Middle Tennessee
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About the author

Jim R. Vanderpool

Jim Vanderpool is a Tennessee attorney who has practiced real estate and estate planning law since 2000. In 2002 he founded Vanderpool Law and Title Services in Franklin, a law firm that does the title work and represents its clients, for buyers and sellers who want more than a title company; the firm has closed more than 15,000 transactions. He is the inventor of Contract Superintelligence, which he began building in 2017 and which produces a settlement statement from a signed contract in about five minutes (the story, the technology), and the founder of ClosingStart, for buyers, sellers and their agents, and Realestart, for the title industry. His paper, Contract Superintelligence: Reading Legal Documents the Way Lawyers Do, is published on the Social Science Research Network, the Elsevier research library where law professors, economists and judges post their work for other scholars to read and cite.