For Tony Roveda, the founder of National Attorney Title, an Ohio-based attorney opinion letter (AOL) firm, the Trump administration’s executive order on housing availability and affordability is a clear indicator that he is launching his firm at the right time.
“In our opinion, our timing is perfect,” Roveda said. “If we would have launched last year, we probably would have been struggling significantly, but we are having ongoing conversations with a number of different institutional lenders that want to get involved with this and want to participate in fixing the housing affordability issue, because it is a really serious issue.”
According to Roveda, a homebuyer who uses one of National Attorney Title’s AOL products instead of a traditional title insurance policy can save between 33% to 77% at the closing table.
Roveda, a housing industry veteran of more than 30 years, began his career in the mortgage space before transferring to real estate brokerages and eventually getting involved in real estate technology and valuation. He said the idea for an AOL company came to him while helping a friend who was exhibiting at the NS3 conference in St. Louis in 2023.
“Everyone there was buzzing about AOL and I was like, ‘Why is everyone talking about America Online?’” Roveda mused. “Everyone was pretty upset about them and I figured that if everyone was upset, then there was probably something there.”
It was this confusion that spurred him to learn more about AOLs and contact a friend at Freddie Mac to learn what the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) thought of AOLs. This was a little over a year after Fannie Mae announced it had amended its selling guide to accept AOLs in lieu of title policies in limited circumstances. Roveda’s friend told him that the GSEs were pushing in the direction of AOLs.
But Roveda said it quickly became clear that there was no clear direction of where things were going with AOLs, so he made the decision to temporarily shelve the idea.
This changed in March 2024, when the GSEs and their regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) announced the launch of a title waiver pilot program. This was designed to “waive the requirement for lender’s title insurance on certain refinance transactions.”
After that announcement, Roveda said he restarted his plans for National Attorney Title and quickly began building a team, preparing for his company’s official launch this month. The company serves buyers nationwide, but Roveda acknowledged that AOLs don’t make sense in all markets.
“There were some states that just don’t work particularly well, like Iowa, where title insurance is state run,” Roveda said. “Right now, we are focusing on high-impact states where title is pretty expensive.”
According to Roveda, the company’s target demographic is first-time and minority homebuyers. “We want them to be able to go to the closing table and not have to fork over a large sum of money,” Roveda said.
To create the AOL offered at National Attorney Title, Roveda worked with the GSEs to fine-tune the product, which he said is very different from the original AOLs that caused such an uproar in the title insurance industry.
“The American Land Title Association (ALTA) got it right with the original AOLs — they were really weak,” Roveda said. “With the guidance of the GSEs, we now have everything that ALTA said we didn’t have: fraud protection, gap coverage and an integrated closing protection letter.”
These additional coverages are part of what Roveda calls an “insurance wrap” that goes with the AOL and covers things like fraud, forgery and title defects. This is designed to go above and beyond the attorney’s standard errors and omissions insurance.
Additionally, he said that the process by which National Attorney Title does its title search and settlement services is the same as what is done for a full title insurance policy. He also noted that the insurance wrap product is regulated at the state level by state departments of insurance, while the attorneys are regulated by their state bar associations.
Although Roveda is aware of the skepticism and outright disdain of AOLs in the title insurance space, he is optimistic about the future.
“We are an alternative,” he said. “We are not trying to kill the title industry. We just want to participate and do what we can to help with this housing issue.”
For now, he said, the company is focused on using its connections to fuel organic growth.
“We are doing a lot of education — deprogramming, reprogramming, tearing them down to build them back up sort of thing,” Roveda said. “A year from now, we are hoping that we have a pretty good handle of a decent market share and just keep growing from there.”
