# Why the Title Company Matters: Inside Our Closings With Fidelity National Title > The company holding your sale proceeds matters as much as the buyer. What a Texas title company really does, why we close through Fidelity National Title, and how to verify it. **Author:** [Corey Dearmont](https://diamondacquisitions.biz/team/corey-dearmont) — Co-Founder & CEO **Published:** 2026-08-19 **Category:** For sellers **Canonical:** https://diamondacquisitions.biz/insights/title-company-matters-fidelity-national-title --- Every seller we talk to asks the same four questions, and they're the right ones. What's the price? When can you close? Do I have to fix anything? What comes out of my proceeds? Almost nobody asks the fifth one: **who is handling title and escrow?** That's the question about the company that will pull the chain of title on your house, surface the liens you may have forgotten about, hold the money in escrow, prepare the deed, and cut your check. On a Diamond purchase the answer is Fidelity National Title's McKinney office, and we've closed more than 1,200 transactions with them. This article is about why that answer should matter to you — and, more usefully, how to verify it yourself, on us or on anybody else offering to buy your house. ## What the title company actually does, and when it starts Most sellers picture the title company as a conference room at the end. You show up, you sign a stack, you leave. That's the last hour of a process that started weeks earlier. The Texas Department of Insurance frames the purpose plainly: title companies "search for problems with the title that need to be corrected before you buy the property" — problems like unpaid property taxes, fraud or forgery in earlier paperwork, or a spouse or unknown heir who claims they own it ([TDI, *What is title insurance?*](https://www.tdi.texas.gov/tips/title-insurance.html)). That search is a records job on your specific parcel. Texas law is fairly precise about it: under the Insurance Code, "closing the transaction" means the investigation made before a policy issues to determine the proper execution, acknowledgment, and delivery of all conveyances, mortgage papers, and other title instruments necessary to consummate the transaction ([Tex. Ins. Code §2501.003](https://codes.findlaw.com/tx/insurance-code/ins-sect-2501-003/)). Somebody reads decades of instruments and reconciles them against each other. The same statute is why the person running your closing isn't a receptionist with a notary stamp. An **escrow officer is a licensed position in Texas** — under Insurance Code Chapter 2652, Subchapter C, a person may not act as one without being licensed by TDI and covered by a surety bond or deposit. Their defined duties include countersigning title insurance forms, supervising the preparation and delivery of those forms, signing escrow checks, and closing the transaction. Read that last part again, because it's the whole argument of this article: **your sale proceeds do not sit in a buyer's business account.** They sit in a regulated escrow account, handled by a licensed officer, with a bond behind them. ## The institution behind the policy Fidelity National Title is part of Fidelity National Financial, Inc. (NYSE: FNF). FNF's title underwriters — Fidelity National Title, Chicago Title, Commonwealth Land Title, Alamo Title, and National Title Insurance of New York — collectively make up the largest title insurance organization in the United States. FNF reports roughly **32.1% of the U.S. title insurance market** based on American Land Title Association data, and it ranked **No. 313 on the 2025 Fortune 500** — the highest-ranked title insurance company on that list. Those numbers establish one thing and one thing only: the balance sheet standing behind the policy is real. That matters if a defect surfaces in 2034 and somebody has to pay for it. It does not close your house. Underwriter scale is what backs a claim years from now. A branch office is what gets your file to the table this month. Sellers conflate the two constantly, and the conflation is expensive, because the failure mode in a real transaction is almost never "the underwriter couldn't pay." It's "nobody told me the payoff came back $9,000 higher than I thought, and now we're moving the closing." ## The branch: McKinney, and the people in it [Fidelity's own office page](https://dallas.fntic.com/Offices/McKinney) lists the McKinney branch at 3100 S. Ridge Road, Suite 100, McKinney, TX 75070, phone 469-408-1460, with **Mike Dulack** as VP, Branch Manager/Escrow Officer. We didn't pick that office off a list. We landed there the way durable vendor relationships actually form — they handled hard files well, repeatedly, until the easy files stopped being the test. Because here is the thing about title work: no two properties have the same ownership history, and the ones that go sideways rarely announce themselves at contract. Over a few hundred transactions you see the same set of complications on rotation: - A payoff statement that comes back materially higher than the owner remembered, or takes a week to arrive. - A lien nobody knew about — a contractor's lien, an old judgment, a state tax lien, an HOA assessment that's been quietly compounding. - A gap in the chain of title: a deceased co-owner never removed, a divorce decree that awarded the house but was never followed by a recorded deed, heirs who have to be established by affidavit. - A name that doesn't match across twenty years of instruments — a maiden name, a middle initial, a trust that was funded informally. - A seller who lives out of state and needs a mobile notary, or a signer who's in a care facility. None of that means the deal is bad. It means the house has a history, and most houses do. What separates a two-week close from a two-month one isn't the absence of problems — it's whether somebody picks up the phone the day a problem surfaces and tells you, in plain language, what's needed and from whom. That's the thing we actually buy from the McKinney office, and it's why we keep sending files there. It's also the part you can't evaluate from a logo. **One disclosure, because it changes how you should read the rest of this:** nobody at Fidelity paid for this article, reviewed it, or asked for it. We have no ownership interest in them and no financial arrangement beyond being a customer who pays for closings. This is our assessment of a vendor, published because sellers ask us who closes their deal and deserve a real answer. ## We're the buyer. They're not. This is the part I'd want understood if I were the one selling. Diamond Acquisitions is a **principal**. We buy houses for our own account, and we assign our own equitable interest in a contract when that's the structure. We are not your agent, we do not represent you, and we are not a licensed real estate brokerage — that's stated at the bottom of every page on this site, and it's stated here too. Fidelity National Title is a separate, Texas-licensed title company. Not a subsidiary of ours, not an affiliate, not something we own a piece of. A Texas escrow agent's obligations run to both parties to the escrow, not to whichever side brought the file in — and the title company carries its own exposure, because it's insuring the title that results. That separation is worth more to you than any promise we could make, because it's structural rather than verbal. Once our contract goes to Fidelity, your file exists somewhere we don't control. You can call that office directly and ask whether the file is open, who the escrow officer is, and what's still outstanding. If a buyer told you a closing was moving and it wasn't, the title company is exactly where that would show up. Which brings up the only genuinely actionable thing in this article. ## Verify it — starting with us Before you sign a contract with any cash buyer, you should be able to answer three questions: what is the legal name of the title company, where is the office, and what is the direct phone number. Then spend ten minutes confirming it independently. 1. **Look up the license yourself.** TDI publishes licensee reports at [appscenter.tdi.texas.gov/tdireports](https://appscenter.tdi.texas.gov/tdireports/p/externalReports) — choose "Title / escrow licensing." If you'd rather talk to a person, TDI's Help Line is **800-252-3439**. 2. **Call the office at a number you found yourself.** Not the number in an email, not a number in the contract packet. Search for the company, or use the number on the licensee record. 3. **Confirm the file exists.** Ask whether a file has been opened on your address, who the escrow officer is, and what they're waiting on. A real transaction has a real answer. 4. **Verify any money instruction by phone**, on that same independently obtained number, every single time — especially if the instructions changed. Run this on us. Our answer is Fidelity National Title, 3100 S. Ridge Road, Suite 100, McKinney, TX 75070, 469-408-1460, Mike Dulack as branch manager and escrow officer. If you'd rather not take our word for anything above, that's the correct instinct, and those four steps are how you settle it before you've committed to anything. ## Why this stopped being paperwork The verification habit used to be good hygiene. It's now the thing standing between a lot of people and a total loss. In 2025, losses reported to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center passed **$20 billion**, with business email compromise the second-largest loss category at roughly **$3 billion**. Real estate closings are a favored target for an obvious reason: a large, known sum moves on a known date between parties who are emailing each other constantly. IC3's own 2025 casework includes a Missouri senior citizen who received a compromised email purporting to come from "the title company," carrying wire instructions for more than $1.3 million, and an August 2025 complaint from buyers who got an email impersonating their own attorneys and wired more than $449,000. TDI's consumer guidance for Texas closings is four rules: - Get a contact name, email address, and phone number for everyone involved in the transaction. - Verify the electronic payment instructions with your title agent. - Beware of any email that asks you to respond immediately or that says electronic payment details have been updated. - After you make an electronic payment, immediately confirm that it was received. Notice that every one of them assumes you already know who the title company is and how to reach them independently. If the first time you learn the name of your closing agent is in the email carrying the wire instructions, you have no way to check that email — the message is its own only source. Knowing your title company before closing isn't administrative trivia. It's the control that makes every other precaution function. And sellers: this is not a buyer's problem. Your proceeds get wired too. A fraudulent change to the *seller's* payout instructions is the identical attack pointed the other direction, and it lands on the one day you're least likely to question a routine-looking email about your own money. ## The fifth question Add one line to the list you were already going to ask a cash buyer: - What's the price? - When can you close? - Do I have to repair anything? - What comes out of my proceeds? - **What title company are we closing with, and what's their direct number?** Then verify the answer. A buyer who can't produce a title company by name, address, and phone — or who gets uncomfortable when you say you'll call to confirm — has told you something more useful than anything on the offer sheet. Our answer has been the same office for more than 1,200 closings, and it's checkable in about ten minutes. That's the standard we think sellers should hold every buyer to, including us. If you're weighing a cash sale on a specific house, the offer number is genuinely only half of it — the other half is whether the closing happens on the date you were promised, and that half runs through the title company. You can [tell us about the property](/sell) and we'll give you real numbers, plus the name and direct line of the people who'd close it. If listing it turns out to be the better move for you, we'll say so. No fees, no obligation. ## About Diamond Acquisitions Diamond Acquisitions (DACQ INC) is a Dallas-based real estate investment company co-founded in April 2023 by Corey Dearmont and Patrick Anderson. We buy houses directly, for cash, with our own funds — across Dallas–Fort Worth and the broader Texas market — in as-is condition, on the seller's timeline. We are a direct buyer, not a brokerage and not a lead broker reselling your information, and every closing we do is handled by a Texas-licensed title company rather than by us. The company is BBB Accredited and A-rated, and veteran-owned. You can read more about [who we are](/about) and [how a sale with us works](/how-it-works), or [request a no-obligation cash offer](/cash-offer).