Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
Well, hello to our listeners and welcome to the Bottom Line Me podcast. I'm your host, Ann Allard. Joining me today is Brad Hoschen. Brad serves as a Vice President at Old Republic National Title Insurance Company. He's the North Central Division Agency Manager and an underwriting counsel. Now, in addition to his management and underwriting responsibilities, Brad frequently speaks at Land Title association conferences and Title Agent seminars where he shares his knowledge and expertise on a variety of industry related topics. He's well known in the region as an engaging public speaker who has a really unique talent for educating his audience with captivating stories.
So today he's here to tell us a little bit about an agency university webinar that will occur in December on unusual encounters in underwriting. That's a mouthful, isn't it? Brad, welcome.
[00:01:12] Speaker B: Hi, Ann, how are you? Hey. I want to thank my mom for writing that introduction. She always write glowing things about me.
[00:01:20] Speaker A: Well, an all around nice guy too, I might add. That's right, absolutely. Well, before we dive into the unusual encounters in underwriting, why don't you take a couple minutes and just tell our audience a little bit about yourself?
[00:01:36] Speaker B: Well, that's kind of you. So as you mentioned, my title here is North Central Division Agency Manager. So I manage Old Republic's agency operations in the upper Midwest, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, and then we handle some issues related to Iowa. But it is sort of the oddity in title insurance United States. So. And that means that my travel schedule is really the Riviera of the Midwest. Right. I find myself in Pier and Aberdeen and Eau Claire and Bismarck doing all sorts of great things with our agents in this region. Before I joined Old Republic, I was in private practice, but handling mostly title insurance litigation. I did some defense work for underwriters as well as defense for title insurance companies.
Before I went to law school, I was a journalist for about 10 years. So I worked for newspapers in New Orleans and in Milwaukee, and then I did some radio and television as well. So then we find ourselves here.
[00:02:39] Speaker A: Wow. And I think one other thing which you didn't mention.
I think I just read that you recently were recognized by the Wisconsin Land association as an industry leader. So congratulations on that.
[00:02:56] Speaker B: Thank you. That was very, very kind of them. I'm not entirely sure I was deserving, but I just finished my year as the immediate past president of the Wisconsin Land Title association. And the year of my presidency, I started the labor and Diversity Committee there.
Like most states, we were sort of battling the silver tsunami, and so we thought a lot about how to bring new people into the industry and also how to make sure that we were hiring folks who looked like our customers. We wanted to make sure that we were finding young people, but also people of different ethnicities to get into an industry that really does provide family supporting jobs. So we did a number of things, including putting together a job board on the WLTA's website. We worked with the technical colleges to get title insurance in the curriculums of their different levels of coursework throughout the state. And then we put together a scholarship fund for students who participated in those courses.
So we really did a lot of different things in a year, very short period of time. And for whatever reason, the organization decided that those efforts and others were worthy of the Mike Willey Leadership Award, which is very, very kind of them.
[00:04:17] Speaker A: Awesome. Well, congratulations again. That's quite a resume. When do you sleep?
[00:04:22] Speaker B: Every third Wednesday.
[00:04:28] Speaker A: Okay. Well, there you go.
Oh, well, thank you for sharing all of that. That was really interesting.
So, as I mentioned in the opening, you're going to be speaking at agency university's final 2024 webinar, and you're going to be talking a lot about underwriting issues. But I understand there are going to be far from typical issues that most of us are familiar with. Things like, you know, erroneous legal descriptions or missing heirs or liens and attachments, some of the more unusual things that have landed on your desk and that, from what I understand, have caused you to kind of scratch your head more than once.
So I'm hoping you can tell us a little bit about the webinar and maybe even share, you know, wet the appetite, share one of the stories without giving everything away.
[00:05:21] Speaker B: Yeah, I might have something I can give you on that. Yeah. Let me say this. I would say over the course of, well, for sure, my eight and a half years here at Old Republic title, but even before that, you just start seeing a weird thing here or there. And. And round about five or six years ago, I decided to start keeping a file. I'm like, well, here's kind of an odd thing. Let me throw this in that file. And here's another thing that looks rather unusual. Let me throw that in this file. And when we were looking to put together a webinar just for our agents here in the North Central Division, we didn't have any particularly new topics. There wasn't anything happening in legislation. And as I recall, it might have been fourth quarter as well. And I said, how news of the weird. How about we just pull out this file and we do news of the weird. And we see what we got. And the next thing I know, my colleagues in underwriting here in the north Central division had also been keeping similar files for years.
And so we had a kind of a really nice pool of files and information that we could pull from to put together a half hour discussion. So then what happens is I'm talking to Joe Alvis with your group. Joe actually came to do a presentation for us in Wisconsin this last spring, and we were talking about news of the weird. I must have done it within a few months of this or that or the other thing. He's like, you know, that might be interesting for agency University. And then he finds somebody in Ohio who's been doing the same darn thing I have. So the next thing you know, we. We have this really kind of interesting laundry list of odd stuff we find in the title records.
[00:07:08] Speaker A: Wow. And people think title insurance is boring now?
[00:07:11] Speaker B: Well, to be clear, it is. We just have a low threshold of what we find entertaining.
[00:07:17] Speaker A: Well, that's interesting, because one of the things I was so curious about was the origin of this. How did this even come about that you, you know, gathered all of this. But, so thanks. That's. That's great. So. So tell us a story or two, would you?
[00:07:30] Speaker B: Well, you know, I mean, let me say this. There are a couple of things. I mean, first of all, some of it is really quite serious, right? But if you look at it sort of in the scope of how it is, we sort of get through our days. That's kind of when it becomes amusing. You know, I think a lot of folks in our industry are used to seeing the filings that come from folks who are government deniers, right? So they belong to organizations that don't believe in the overall power of the government. So we had a fellow in Wisconsin who wanted to buy a parcel of property and needed a mortgage. But then as soon as he got the mortgage, he decided to say that he was not governed by the government of the United States, and therefore the mortgage didn't attach to his property. And so the next thing we know, he's filing in literally thousands of paper pages of documents clouding his own title. My favorite was he filed a $5 million UCC against himself to keep the bank from having priority in order to foreclose against the property. And he, He. I never met him, but he was clearly quite a character. So he would go to record documents at the register of deeds office, and he would sign a docum document, but then he would take a pin and he would pierce his thumb and he would put a bloody thumbprint on every document in lieu of a notary, I guess, a bloody thumbprint on every document. And then the registers of deeds would put on gloves and take the papers from him and record them in the record.
The bottom line is that the bank was finally able to foreclose. But they asked us to provide insurance over all of these junk filings, and we said, we'll do it. But we took an indemnification from them for any. First of all, they had to go back to the court and get the court to completely invalidate all of those documents. And then we took an indemnification. So, you know, it is a serious concept, right? But one of the things he did is his name was Taylor Joseph Formanock, and he said that he had actually formed a trust called Taylor Joseph. And Barack Obama was the trustee of the trust, and Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin at the time, was an associate trustee of the trust, and that the trust document was kept in his 1987 Chevy Impala, and that the trustee of the Impala was the secretary of the Department of Transportation for the state of Wisconsin. So it was just all of this sort of silly ridiculousness that we had to try and sort out in order to be able to insure the property.
[00:10:25] Speaker A: How much time does something like. I mean, that sounds like an awful lot to try and.
[00:10:30] Speaker B: Oh, first of all, hours and hours and hours and hours and, I mean, months and months and months. You know, in order to work with the lender, to be able to try and clear the title. I mean, you know, this was a file that. That I was working on for months and months and months. And, you know, it's funny because we talked about my.
We talked about my resume. And I will tell you that one of the reasons I decided to go to law school is that I found journalism to be so much of a what have you done for me lately? Sort of career, right? You could win a Pulitzer on Tuesday and the paper still had to go it on Wednesday.
And then I became an attorney and I'm like, oh, my God, files never end. Like, you know, you have a case that goes on for five or six or seven years. I was an attorney for 15, a private practice attorney for 15 years. I had a case, I worked on myself for six years. I have now been out of private practice for eight years. And I had to give a deposition in that same case six months ago. It's still going on 14 years.
So one of the nice things about title insurance Is that it does kind of find a happy medium to that. Right. There's lots of stuff that I do that just sort of quick hit answers. But on the other hand, there's a file like this one that sort of tickles the brain for a handful of months at a time.
[00:11:47] Speaker A: Well, it sounds to me like it's not the kind of thing you can insure over. I mean, these are, these are, you know, can. Can create failures. Entitled.
[00:11:55] Speaker B: That's right. And in that particular instance we did get, we required a court order, but then we also required full indemnification from the lender so that if anything came back, the lender and, and the lender agreed. Honestly, the lender owned the title agency that was ins. So the lender agreed to provide us with full indemnification.
[00:12:14] Speaker A: Whoa. You know what's so interesting too about this story that you just shared, is it, it was sort of a self inflicted, you know, cloud on the title by, you know, by the owner. I was thinking these, this stuff in terms of somebody almost being victimized by something that could create it.
[00:12:33] Speaker B: But this sort of silliness, Ann, is almost always self inflicted. Do you have time for another one? I can give you another quick.
So this one is one of my favorites. We. I got a file one morning where the agent said, hey, I'm really concerned about this file. And title was held by Mittens and Buttons Johnston. And I'm like, that doesn't make any sense to me. We need to figure this out. And so we reached out to the woman who was selling her property and rather embarrassed, she told us that one evening she got angry at her children and she drank. And then she went to her computer and printed out a quit claim deed and deeded her property to her cats.
And then she, while still drunk, put the deed and a check for $30 in an envelope and mailed it off to the register of deeds. And she deeded her property to her cats so that her children wouldn't get it. The problem is that before she died, she wanted to sell her property and move somewhere and the property is now owned by her cats. You talk about a self inflicted wound. I mean, there's a reason I never drink more than two cocktails while practicing law. Ann, wow.
[00:13:51] Speaker A: How in the heck do you undo something like that?
[00:13:55] Speaker B: Well, so you don't. I mean, what happens is we required that the cats have a guardian because the cats are incompetent.
[00:14:02] Speaker A: Cats had a guardian.
[00:14:03] Speaker B: So the, the court granted a guardianship of the cats. The woman was lucky that the Court granted the guardianship to her. So she was able to sell the property and then she was able to use the money to purchase a replacement property because it was for the benefit of the cats. That is, the cats benefited by her owning a home. Right. Um, but there's a, there was a guardianship for the cats. And what she had to hope was that she would outlive the cats. And then as the only heir of the cats, if you will, presuming she wasn't breeding them, I suppose she would eventually come back in to title herself. Nightmarish. Absolutely nightmarish. And completely self inflicted.
[00:14:45] Speaker A: I mean, I don't know whether I want to laugh or just shake my head or something.
I mean, it's just bizarre.
[00:14:54] Speaker B: But yeah, this. Yeah. I mean, there's a reason that Wisconsin consumes more alcohol than any other states of the country.
Yes.
I don't know if you've ever seen this list. There's a list that floats around on the Internet of the. I think it's the 15 or 20 drunkest cities in America and seven of them are in Wisconsin. So they did not know that.
[00:15:20] Speaker A: Wow.
Note to self, keep paper and pen away from somebody in Wisconsin after they dad a martini.
[00:15:29] Speaker B: That's right.
But to your point, not all of them are self inflicted. And the other thing I would say is not all of them are actually as odd as they may seem. I'll give you one quick glimpse. The one other that we saw is we had title that came to us as property in Minnesota being owned by the Queen of England.
We were like, well, how in the heck are we going to get the signature of Queen Elizabeth? And at the time Queen Elizabeth was still alive, but you know, what is this? Some sort of fraud, what's going on, et cetera, et cetera. So in actuality, the property was being purchased by Canada for use of its U.S. consulate. So they were. It wasn't an ambassador, but it was a consulate who is going to be here in Minnesota. And when the Canadian government purchases property because they are still technically part of the United Kingdom, they purchase it in the name of the monarch of the United Kingdom. So although it said it was owned by Queen Elizabeth and we didn't know what to do, in actuality, the Canadian government is like, well, here, this and that, and here's the other thing, and here's the document, it was all quite intentional and we were able to ensure the transaction.
Who knew? Right? Who knew?
Who knew that Her Majesty would own property in the great state of Minnesota?
[00:16:56] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Well, this sounds like the kind of webinar that no one that's listening should want to miss. There's going to be some great stories. I think maybe that's what I will.
[00:17:06] Speaker B: Say that, you know, if there's one that you just kind of want to be entertained and get your credit at the same time.
But there are also. There are some nuggets, for sure. There are some things to learn, but it really is about Frank and I being able to string some fun stories together with a moral at the end, if you will.
[00:17:26] Speaker A: Exactly. Well, that's perfect. That's perfect. Well, that sounds like a perfect bottom line. Unless you have one other bottom line you'd like to share with us before we finish.
[00:17:34] Speaker B: You know, I can't give away all my secrets.
[00:17:37] Speaker A: No, we just really, as I said, we just wanted to kind of whet the appetite and create some. Some interest. But I sure won't miss this one. Sounds awesome. And I also, you know, I mean, the history part of it is always interesting to me too, particularly the story you just told about Queen Elizabeth. So, I mean, who knew?
[00:18:00] Speaker B: That's right. So there must still be properties in the United States that are title to the Queen, I suspect. And there would then have to be a way for now, King Charles to transfer those properties.
[00:18:12] Speaker A: Exactly. Well, we'll have to run it in the grantee index next time I'm at the comes up. But anyway, that's wrong.
Well, Brad, this was really very entertaining for me and I really enjoy being able to spend a little time with you and for you to take the time to share this with us and to our audience. If you're interested in learning more about the webinar or registering for it, I believe it's going to be Thursday, December 12th.
[00:18:44] Speaker B: That's correct. Yep.
I know that because I'm in. I'm in sioux Falls, South Dakota, the 10th and 11th. So. See, I told you how glamorous my travel schedule was, so. Yes. Thursday, December 12th.
[00:18:57] Speaker A: Great. So reach out to your sales rep or I think you could probably go. If you're an older public title agent, you probably find information on starslink under the agency University section of starslink. So, Brad, well, thanks so much for spending some time with me today. I'm really looking forward to the webinar and I'll have to get you back again to talk a little bit more about your other endeavors.
[00:19:24] Speaker B: Well, hey, Ann, it's always a pleasure to chat with you. I really appreciate it. I'm happy to come back anytime.
[00:19:29] Speaker A: Well, that's great. Well, thanks. And to our listening audience.
Thanks again for taking the time to join us. Till we meet you again, I hope you'll all continue to learn, grow and prosper. Thank you.
