Twenty years later, that small city now has a population of about 200,000, and Executive Title Insurance Services Inc. employs 103 people in nine offices in four counties plus two title research plants and an administrative office. And the company president plans to open offices in Punta Gorda and Venice before 2002. “Within that 20 years, we have grown to doing more than twice the amount of business as our next competitor as far as the number of deeds transferred,” says President and Chief Executive Richard Yankowski Jr.

Executive Title has claimed a top spot in market share, as the leader in Lee County for the past six years, Yankowski says. Within a year after opening the Charlotte County office in 1991, the company claimed the No. 3 spot there, and for the past six years, it has been No. 1 in the number of deed transfers. “In Sarasota we’re No. 2 or 3, and in Collier County, we’re working on that,” he says with a grin. “We’re in the Top 10.”

The title company has been riding the real estate wave in Southwest Florida, and as it celebrates its 20th anniversary in December, there are no signs that the surge has slowed. The company averages about 1,000 closings per month, says Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Annie Robertson.

“A couple of years ago we did an analysis on our accounts that showed we put a billion dollars a year through our escrow accounts insuring real estate,” Yankowski says. “There are a lot of small banks that don’t put that amount of money through escrow accounts in Southwest Florida.”

In fact, Yankowski expects the company, which now has some heavyweight help behind it in the form of its relationship with Houston-based Stewart Title Guaranty, to continue growing and thriving. His plans? To double the size of the company in five years. “I want to do 2,006 closings a month before 2006,” he says. “With that, I plan on expanding with three additional offices here within the Southwest Florida market and also growing our market share within our existing markets.”

Longer term, he plans even more growth, but not too fast. “You’ve got to know your markets and you’ve got to spend a lot of time nurturing those new markets,” Yankowski says. “I see the day that Executive Title has offices from Marco to Bradenton and that’s as far as I want to be, because I feel that is the Southwest Florida market.”

Executive Title deals primarily with existing home sales. About 5 percent of its business comes from commercial real estate transactions—it recently handled the title work for the Summerlin Road property where the new Publix stands and for a new post office in Fort Myers. But 95 percent of its business comes from residential properties. In a typical year, 90 percent of the business is resales, 5 percent is new construction and the remaining 5 percent is refinance business. Because interest rates have been so low this year, Yankowski estimates that refinancings have comprised between 15 and 20 percent of the business this year. “With these rates being as low as they are, there are a lot of people moving up. Instead of people refinancing their loan, what they’re doing is moving into a bigger house and there are a lot of first-time home buyers,” he says.

Even with an economic slowdown, Yankowski has no doubt that the regional real estate market will remain strong. “I still think it’s a big dream for most of the American public to retire and I think that the No. 1 destination is Florida,” he says. “Percentage-wise, you probably won’t see a higher-growth area than we’ll see in Southwest Florida.”

Where Relationships Count

A homegrown, family-focused business, Executive Title was incorporated in 1981 by Bill Townsend with just one office. (Townsend’s son, Will, is still with Executive Title as title plant manager.) By 1989, when Richard Yankowski Sr. bought out Townsend’s former partner, Executive Title had additional offices in Fort Myers, Sanibel, Bonita Springs, Naples and Lehigh Acres, as well as, a second Cape Coral office. Now, the company also has offices in Englewood, Port Charlotte and Sarasota. Yankowski Sr., who spent about a year as general manager before buying into the company, eventually acquired Townsend’s share in the mid-1990s.

The younger Yankowski credits his father for instilling in him the company’s business skills. A background in banking, running multiple branches, forecasting and budgeting were not necessarily typical in title companies, Yankowsi says. His dad also built on that foundation by urging Yankowski to complete the Executive MBA Program at Florida Gulf Coast University, helping ensure that the company would continue to have leadership with a good understanding of business practices. Yankowski has been with the company since 1989, when he started as a typist and learned the business by working in its various departments. He opened the first Charlotte County office in 1991. In 1997, he was promoted to vice president. “The company is very close-knit,” says Robertson, who started with Executive Title in 1983 as a processor. “At one point with the Yankowskis, we had all three sons and a daughter-in-law and Mr. Yankowski all working here.”

The company has a number of long-term employees. It’s estimated that at least 25 of the 103 employees have been with the Executive Title for more that 10 years, and probably more than 50 have been there for five years or more. “And you know, in today’s work environment, that’s a rarity,” Yankowski adds.

After buying out Townsend, the elder Yankowski was sole owner until the beginning of this year, when he sold the company to Stewart Title Guaranty Co., a 108-year-old multifaceted and international corporation. Stewart Title also is Executive Title’s underwriter.

The elder Yankowski remains on Executive Title’s board of directors. But his son has taken the reins as president and CEO, and he and Robertson run the company. They retain autonomy from Stewart Title in much of their decision-making and activities, from marketing to plans to grow the business. “We are owned by Stewart Title but we are locally operated. They have over 5,500 companies like Executive Title, which are operated locally with their own boards,” Yankowski says. “They’ve got offices from Australia to Russia to right here in Cape Coral, Florida with over 35,000 people who work for them. So it kind of gives you the power of a national company with local control.”

Executive Title has produced between $8 million and $10 million per year in insurance premiums over the past three years, which represents about 10,000 transactions, Yankowski says.

“I can tell you they are just one jam-up company,” says Peggy Frain, coordinator of Stewart Title’s Region D, which encompasses Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. “They are wiping up the floor with everybody else. They are an extremely, extremely high-producing company,” she says.

One could argue that the company’s revenues are being diverted from the local economy to Houston, but Executive Title’s leaders argue that it continues to feed the local economy. Yankowski emphasizes that Executive Title feeds Southwest Florida’s economy with $3.5 million every year in the form of payroll checks. And the company’s vendors are local, Robertson says.

Yankowski also expects Executive Title to finance its own expansion without Stewart’s financial help. “They let our company make those decisions. We are in charge of expanding ourselves. You can get them to lend the money, but I want to be totally self-sufficient. We’ve done really well and what better way to use your income than to expand with it and make your company stronger?”

A Little-Understood Business

Just about everyone who buys or sells real estate employs the services of a title company, yet many customers never fully understand the nature of title companies and title insurance. Anyone who has bought or sold property remembers the mind-boggling stack of documents that required signatures, but few could explain what each document was. That is the title company’s realm—making sure that all the legal, financial and other measures are taken to help protect the buyer and the lender from unexpected glitches.

What can happen without title insurance? Yankowski and Robertson have seen and heard of several colorful scenarios, such as a former company in Charlotte County that persuaded customers to bypass title insurance. The company, however, was not paying off the mortgages. Because foreclosure notices were going to the company, homebuyers didn’t realize as they moved into their new homes that they were being foreclosed upon. Or there was the time a woman was caught duplicating a check on the company’s account based on a photocopy; she was caught because she didn’t know the color of the original. And there were the times when men took their girlfriends to closings to forge their wife’s signature.

In a nutshell, a title company ensures that a deed to a property doesn’t have any hitches—no estate problems, no ownership disputes or questions about property boundaries, and no fraud, forgeries or defects in the title-before it is transferred to a new owner. The company checks the property survey and researches the legal history of the deed, and its underwriter issues insurance to protect against any of these potential problems or conflicts. Typically, both the buyer and the lender take out title insurance, a one-time premium. The title company is usually the third party that actually passes the deed from the seller to the buyer. The title company is not a law firm; however, it does have access to attorneys when they are needed. “Really what we are is a service provider,” Yankowski says. “We put together the figures, we are the coordinator between you and all the other parties to bring you to the table, and we handle all your escrow funds.”

Executive Title, unlike many title companies, does all its work in-house rather than subcontracting certain tasks, such as title searches. Yankowski says that having the backing of Stewart Information Services, an affiliate of Stewart Title, has been a tremendous asset, partly because it has the financial heft to provide resources that smaller companies cannot afford on their own. “Our affiliation with Stewart Title has put a personnel of over 200 people at my fingertips to use in technology,” he says. “We actually house our main computers in Houston to have them service them and have us up and running at all times. They put over $4 million into their computer department to make sure it never goes down.

“I’ve never seen anything like it. They’ve got the A/C at 60 degrees and if there’s ever a fire, it sucks all the oxygen out and puts out the fire instead of using water, which would destroy all your computer equipment,” he says.

Climbing the Technology Ladder

Technology is at the core of the title industry’s future—and innovations now are a far cry from the brand-new fax machine that everyone drove over to admire just a decade or so ago. It wasn’t long ago—and for many companies, it still is true—that a quick turn-around was two weeks from the time an order came in to the closing date. “These days, we’ve done things in two hours with technology and really that’s where our focus is, is how to make our process go a little bit smoother with technology and how to make the process easier for the consumer,” Yankowski says.

One of the industry’s biggest challenges is that the customer never sees all the documents until he comes to the table for the closing. At that point, the customer often doesn’t understand the documents and it often falls to the real estate agent or the closer to explain. Yankowski believes the process could go much faster if they sent the documents via e-mail or had the customer come in ahead of time to review the documents. “That’s where our industry is really going, to make the process better for the consumer,” he says. The challenge is how to get to an insurable title in a manner where not only are people more informed, but there’s even less liability.

Executive Title has established a computer network among its offices so all employees have personal e-mail accounts, enabling them to communicate more effectively among themselves and with Realtors and lenders. “That’s a tremendous time-saver because you don’t have to track down these very busy individuals in the lending institutions or real estate institutions,” Yankowski says. “You’ve also got a paper trail.”

Executive Title has a high level of name recognition, even to those who are not in the industry. But it’s the company’s track record and its emphasis on personal relationships that count because real estate agents—the primary link between the title company and the customer—need to know they can depend on its performance. Michael Schneider-Christians, a real estate agent with Century 21 Sunbelt Realty in Cape Coral, has known of Executive Title since the mid-’80s and uses its services regularly. “I know their work, they’ve been here for years, they’ve got a good name in the community,” he says.

Mark Bucholtz, president and owner of Creative Mortgage Corporation of Southwest Florida, learned about Executive through the golf league the company promotes—one of Executive Title’s numerous community activities. More important, though, Bucholtz says he has unshakable faith in Gina Noonan, his Executive contact. Even when he has to work with a different title company, chosen by the seller, he calls Noonan for explanations that the other company can’t provide. A closing with Executive can take 24 to 48 hours instead of a week or more with other companies, Bucholtz says. If there’s a delay, Bucholtz says he’s fully informed why. “The standard was set by Executive Title,” he says. “They do what they tell me they’re going to do when they tell me they’re going to do it.”

Yankowski’s keys to marketing successfully are professionalism, consistency, integrity and a reputation for getting the job done right. “No matter whether you’re rich or you’re poor, this is the single largest personal transaction that a person’s going to do in their life, so you’ve got to be professional, you’ve got to have a professional environment, you’ve got to drive at a goal.

“Our goal is not to produce revenue and see if we can be No. 1. You don’t get there if that’s what your only pursuit is. It’s really providing a good service to our customers—that ‘magnificent moment’ at closing,” he adds with a smile.

Jill Tyrer is a freelance writer and editor.