Asked what single change he’d make to title insurance regulation nationally, Attorney Marc Evan Rovner didn’t hesitate. “Everything varies so much state to state, and there’s no continuity, and we’re in different states, and it just gets too confusing for the end-use consumer,” he said. Rovner is General Counsel and Director of Business Development at Beta Abstract LLC, a multi-state title company operating across New York, New Jersey, Florida and Connecticut. He’s spent more than 38 years watching buyers hit the same wall: the rules that govern their closing depend entirely on which side of a state line the property sits.
Texas Cuts Twice in Eight Months
Texas shows how differently states handle title insurance pricing, and it’s happening right now. Texas is one of a small handful of states, alongside Florida and New Mexico, where the state regulates and sets title insurance rates directly rather than letting insurers file their own. In February 2025, Texas Insurance Commissioner Cassie Brown ordered a 10 percent cut to the state’s title insurance basic premium rates, effective that July. The estimated savings: $238 million a year, back in buyers’ pockets. Less than a year later, regulators went further. A second order, signed in December 2025, cut basic premium rates by another 6.2 percent, effective March 1, 2026. Two cuts in eight months are possible precisely because Texas is a promulgated-rate state, where one regulatory decision resets the price for every title company at once.
A filed-rate state doesn’t work that way. Each insurer sets its own rate within a regulatory band, so no single order moves the whole market. Marc Rovner pointed to California as a further wrinkle on top of that basic split: “California, it changes county to county,” he said. Even the state-versus-state comparison undersells how granular the variation actually gets.
The split between promulgated-rate and filed-rate states doesn’t just change who moves first on a price cut. It changes what a buyer actually pays for the same coverage, sometimes by hundreds of dollars on an identical purchase price, depending entirely on which regulatory model their state happens to use. It also shapes an ongoing fight in Washington. State legislators have moved to formally reaffirm state-based title insurance regulation against what one model resolution calls growing federal encroachment, while the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has separately pushed, as recently as this August, for changes to the TILA-RESPA Integrated Disclosure rule aimed at cutting the same consumer confusion Rovner is describing, just from a federal angle rather than a state one.
An Industry Too Small to Fix Its Own Fragmentation
Marc Rovner traces the persistence of that patchwork to something more specific than regulatory inertia: an industry with no organized voice pushing back on it. “There’s just not a lot. There’s just not a strong lobby, I would say. It’s a very underlooked industry,” he said, “because in theory, it’s the type of insurance there shouldn’t be any claims” against. A title policy insures that a property is free of liens and encumbrances from the date the record begins to the date of closing. Once a search clears title and any encumbrances get paid off at closing, the coverage rarely gets triggered the way a car or homeowners policy does. “It really should be two plus two equals four,” Rovner said of how simple the underlying product is supposed to be. But the fifty-state patchwork of who sets rates, how they’re set, and how often they change means the product a consumer receives looks nothing alike from one closing table to the next. A bigger, better-organized industry voice is exactly what Rovner’s underlooked-industry diagnosis suggests has been missing.
Practitioners Absorb What Regulation Won’t Standardize
The burden of translating that patchwork falls on the people running the closings. “It’s very difficult with the different states having different regulations,” Rovner said, “I also feel that the title industry in general, we’re a small industry and we’ll help each other.” He added a pointed caveat, too: people outside the industry rarely grasp how much simpler and cheaper the process could be if it were streamlined. For a firm like Beta Abstract, operating across four states with four different rate structures and four different sets of disclosure rules, that means the same transaction type can require a materially different playbook depending on where the property sits.
