the wasserblawg

First American Title Insurance Company announced today that it too will no longer accept third party checks at Chicago area residential real estate closings. They join Chicago Title and PNTN , who already declared an end to the age old practice of telling buyers to bring funds to closing in the form of cashiers checks made payable "to themselves." These net effect of these three announcements (and the many more that are about to follow) is that the rules have changed for ALL local closings... and anyone not keeping abreast is going to have an unfortunate  problem at their next closing. 1st American's notice takes the issue even one step further, and this will be of particular concern and import to real estate lawyers :  First Am will no longer accept third party title insurance company checks either . In other words, Buyers who intend to use the proceeds of a sale to close their next purchase at First American better have a lawyer (or realtor) who is hip to the new

Title Companies are changing the way some Buyers are going to need to bring purchase money funds to closing. If these changes are rigidly enforce, the transition is likely to be a rough one and anyone with a purchase or sale closing coming up in the near term should expect a greater likelihood of delays / aggravation.   The long standing "best practice" for having Buyers bring funds to a closing table has been to instruct them  to bring cashiers' checks to a closing table made payable to themselves. Until now, it has  just  the way things have been done my whole career. Back in June , I reported seeing a notice from one of the local Chicago Title offices indicating that CT would require all checks be made payable directly to the title company. At that time, only one or two offices were actually  requiring this, and everything was business as usual. Closing bays at Chicago Title's flagship offices  in Chicago now sport notices that CT will no longer accept such