First American

Michelle and company… are awesome. They handled my double closing, without a hitch.
This was my 4^th and 5^th closing in Seattle, and the ONLY Escrow/​Title company that did make make my life a living hell.

Atrocious. Poor communication. Very unresponsive. Stay away.

We’ve used many different escrow companies over the years and all have been fine. We recently used Michael Santucci at First American on Eastlake and were very impressed. This was a short sale which had a number of additional closing requirements plus required numerious revisions to the HUD-​1 in order to show the short sale lender different scenarios and (eventually) get its approval of the deal. Michael was always very responsive and got us everything we needed immediately in order to get this deal approved and then closed on a pretty short timeline. We were very impressed and would highly recommend Michael and First American. Our only regret was that we never got to meet Michael in person as we did the whole thing remotely.

It’s kind of hard to rate an escrow company on their services, isn’t it? If they do their job right you really don’t need to know what it is they’re doing behind the scenes. We’ve previously used a couple of different escrow services, and I’m not entirely sure why our mortgage guy decided to use Talon this time around, but he did and here we are.
Coming from Ballard, the Eastlake location is a little inconvenient, but the offices are nicely put together and the staff we dealt with were all accommodating and helpful. There is an informal air about the facility that is relaxing. They didn’t mind that I brought my bike up to the offices, having misplaced my lock, and they even offered to make us fresh coffee at 3pm on a Friday afternoon if we wanted some.
Our closing officer, Michael, was efficient and friendly and quickly gauged how familiar and comfortable we were with the cprocess, and tailored his explanations of the multitude of documents accordingly. We were using the Fiserv eSigning application, which is not the most stable piece of software I’ve ever seen, and he worked through the various glitches quickly and apologetically to get us on our way. It’s worth noting that the eSigning software was the lender’s choice, not the Talon Group’s.
If you have a choice of mortgage services, and the Talon Group is located conveniently for you, I’d recommend their services. The only reason I’d balk at using them the future is their location relative to my home and work.

Received an email from Talon — stating they’d heard other complaints & had reorganized their office — good for them. I appreciate the follow up.