The Story of CHAMPtitles: Building the Future of Real Estate Title Through Automation

The Story of CHAMPtitles: Building the Future of Real Estate Title Through Automation

Shane Bigelow didn’t set out to revolutionize the title insurance industry with elegant software built from a distance. He did something far more unconventional: he bought a title agency, rolled up his sleeves, and spent years processing actual title searches and closings before writing a single line of code.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Shane McRann Bigelow, CEO of CHAMPtitles, shared the winding path from traditional title operations to building one of the most promising automation platforms in real estate. It’s a story about patience, deep industry knowledge, and understanding when software alone isn’t enough.

The Operational Genesis

CHAMPtitles’ origin story defies the typical tech startup playbook. While most founders start by building an MVP and iterating based on customer feedback, Shane took a fundamentally different approach. He acquired an existing title agency in Pennsylvania and became a title operator first, technologist second.

“We bought a title agency in Pennsylvania and we ran it,” Shane explains. “We did all the title work in house, did all the closings in house.” This wasn’t a brief immersion experience or a consulting engagement—it was a multi-year operational commitment that gave the founding team an education no amount of customer interviews could provide.

The decision came from hard-earned wisdom about vertical markets. Shane had watched software companies enter complex industries with ambitious platforms, only to fail because they didn’t understand the nuances of the business they were trying to automate. The title industry, with its state-by-state regulations, significant liability exposure, and intricate workflows, seemed particularly hostile to outsiders.

“There’s this old adage, you know, software eats the world. And I think in a lot of verticals that’s true,” Shane notes. “But in title, title eats software companies.” This recognition shaped everything that followed.

Learning the Hard Way

Running an actual title agency meant experiencing every pain point firsthand. The team processed real transactions, dealt with actual regulatory requirements, and handled the liability that comes with title insurance. They learned which tasks were genuinely complex and which were just tediously manual. They discovered where automation could add value and where human expertise remained essential.

The insights were revelatory. “Every single closing that comes through the door requires a search of the public records,” Shane explains. “You have to go find them, pull them back, review them, type findings, type exceptions into a commitment document.” This work consumed enormous amounts of time but required relatively little expertise. “That type of work is just manual labor. It doesn’t require an immense amount of subject matter expertise.”

These observations became the foundation for CHAMPtitles’ automation strategy. Rather than trying to replace title officers with AI, they would eliminate the repetitive busywork that prevented skilled professionals from doing what they did best: analyzing complex title issues and making judgment calls.

Building with Credibility

When CHAMPtitles finally began building software, they had something most proptech startups lack: credibility. They weren’t outsiders promising to fix an industry they didn’t understand. They were title professionals who happened to be building automation tools.

This credibility proved invaluable when approaching potential customers. Title agents didn’t need to explain their workflows or justify why certain features mattered—the CHAMPtitles team already knew. They’d experienced the same frustrations, dealt with the same regulations, and understood the same liability concerns.

The operational experience also informed critical product decisions about what not to automate. In title work, certain judgments carry significant legal and financial consequences. CHAMPtitles built their platform to handle mechanical tasks while keeping human expertise in the loop for decisions that required it.

The Multi-State Expansion

With a working product and operational proof of concept in Pennsylvania, CHAMPtitles faced a crucial decision about expansion. They could have gone deep in a single state, dominating that market before moving to others. Instead, they chose to deliberately target regulatory diversity.

“We picked states that were representative of kind of the diversity of the market and also were large markets,” Shane explains. They expanded into Florida and Texas—two states with dramatically different regulatory frameworks from Pennsylvania and from each other.

“Florida, there’s no attorney involvement in a closing. In Pennsylvania, attorneys are mandated to be involved. Texas, optional.” Each state forced the platform to become more adaptable and robust. What worked in Pennsylvania had to be reimagined for Florida’s different requirements, then adapted again for Texas.

This strategy was more difficult than focusing on a single state, but it created a more defensible business. Each new state made the platform stronger, building a moat that single-state competitors would struggle to overcome.

Rethinking the Business Model

As the platform matured, CHAMPtitles made another unconventional decision: they abandoned the SaaS model entirely. Instead of charging software fees, they structured the business around title insurance economics.

“We’re not a SaaS company. We are an insurance distribution business at our core,” Shane clarifies. “We give the software away for free to partner agents. And we make our revenue off of a rev share of the title insurance premium that they collect.”

This model eliminated the biggest friction point in enterprise software sales: budget approval. Title agents could start using CHAMPtitles’ automation immediately without procurement processes, budget negotiations, or ROI justifications. Revenue sharing only kicked in when transactions actually closed.

The decision reflected a deep understanding of how the title industry actually works. The real money flows through insurance premiums, not software subscriptions. By aligning their business model with that reality, CHAMPtitles created a frictionless path to adoption.

The Vision for Scale

Today, CHAMPtitles continues to operate at the intersection of title operations and technology. They still run their own title agency, maintaining the operational insight that informed the platform’s creation. But Shane’s vision extends far beyond automating title searches.

“You’ve got to crawl before you walk, before you run,” Shane notes about their phased approach. “And so a lot of the work we did on the front end was automating on the title side of the process.” With that foundation established, they’re expanding into closing automation, remote online notarization, and other innovations that will further streamline real estate transactions.

The ultimate goal is what Shane calls a “fully digital closing”—a transaction process where many steps that currently require physical presence or paper documents can be handled electronically. It’s an ambitious vision that requires solving technical, regulatory, and adoption challenges simultaneously.

Building the Future

CHAMPtitles’ story offers a different path for founders entering complex, regulated industries. It suggests that sometimes the best way to build transformative technology is to first become an expert in the domain you’re trying to transform.

The approach requires more capital, more time, and more patience than typical software startups. But it produces something that pure technology plays often cannot: solutions that actually work in production, built by people who understand the industry from the inside out.

As real estate continues its gradual digitization, CHAMPtitles is positioned not as a disruptor but as a trusted partner—because they’ve walked in their customers’ shoes and built the tools they wished they’d had themselves.