Land Title Associations and Standardized Policies
In the United States, the American Land Title Association (ALTA) is a national trade association of title insurance underwriters and title insurance agents. ALTA has created standard forms of title insurance policy "jackets" (standard terms and conditions) for Owners, Lenders and Construction Loan policies. ALTA forms are used in most, but not all, U.S. states. ALTA also offers special endorsement forms for the various policies; endorsements amend and typically broaden the coverage given under a basic title insurance policy. ALTA does not issue title insurance; it provides standardized policy and endorsement forms that most title insurers issue.
Some states, including Texas and New York, may mandate the use of forms of title insurance policy jackets and endorsements approved by the state insurance commissioner for properties located in those jurisdictions, but these forms are usually similar or identical to ALTA forms.
In addition to ALTA, which primarily represents the interests of national title insurance underwriters in the title insurance industry, the National Association of Independent Land Title Agents (NAILTA) is a national non-profit trade association that represents the interests of independent title insurance agents and independent real estate settlement professionals from across the United States. It was created by independent real estate settlement professionals to further the agenda of small business owners from within the title insurance, abstracting, surveying, and real estate community who lack representation at local, state and national levels. NAILTA is a national trade association that serves thousands of independent title and real estate professionals across the United States who collectively comprise over 60% of the national title insurance market and identify themselves as independent settlement service providers. NAILTA represents the interests of those independent settlement service providers who serve over 31 million real estate purchase consumers per year, who close an estimated $514.8 billion dollars’ worth of refinance mortgages per year and who collectively insure approximately $1.67 trillion dollars in total national title insurance liability per year.
Read more about this topic: Title Insurance
Famous quotes containing the words land, title, associations, standardized and/or policies:
“The prairies were dust. Day after day, summer after summer, the scorching winds blew the dust and the sun was brassy in a yellow sky. Crop after crop failed. Again and again the barren land must be mortgaged for taxes and food and next year’s seed. The agony of hope ended when there was not harvest and no more credit, no money to pay interest and taxes; the banker took the land. Then the bank failed.”
—Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968)
“A familiar name cannot make a man less strange to me. It may be given to a savage who retains in secret his own wild title earned in the woods. We have a wild savage in us, and a savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as ours.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Wild as it was, it was hard for me to get rid of the associations of the settlements. Any steady and monotonous sound, to which I did not distinctly attend, passed for a sound of human industry.... Our minds anywhere, when left to themselves, are always thus busily drawing conclusions from false premises.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is part of the nature of consciousness, of how the mental apparatus works, that free reason is only a very occasional function of people’s “thinking” and that much of the process is made of reactions as standardized as those of the keys on a typewriter.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“A nation’s domestic and foreign policies and actions should be derived from the same standards of ethics, honesty and morality which are characteristic of the individual citizens of the nation.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)