Our experience with Placer Title was an absolutely horrible one. Maybe it's 1 bad employee (trying to give the benefit of the doubt here) but after experiencing what we went through, we would not recommend them.
Michelle Schaffert was our escrow officer. To begin with, our grant deed was incorrect. She processed the form as "joint tenants" when it was supposed to have been "community property with right of survivorship". We contacted our realtor who in turned reached out to her. She e-mailed us a corrected form to be processed but did not spell-check the document so the form had to be re-done again. She instructed us to go into any Placer Title Office to have the form notarized and they would take care of it. On 11/12/12, we went into the Davis Office but they didn't know anything about it, and we understand that sometimes this happens. However, when the Davis Office tried to make contact with her, she was out of the office, no one in the Auburn Office knew anything about our situation, and to top things off, they could not find our file. (Michelle could have easily mentioned to any co-worker that a "grant deed correction is coming to our office" but did not.) Luckily, we had our laptop with us so we were able to show the Davis Office the correspondence, and they took care of it from there. When we got the new grant deed in the mail, we thought the matter was resolved. Then, we noticed that Sacramento County made a correction to the document. They put correction tape over the code she used and penned in a different one.
Several months later, we received our property tax bill and notice an error which was stemmed directly from escrow. We were billed $702.16 in delinquent utility bills from the seller and were only credited $638.43, a difference of $63.73. Again, we contacted our Realtor who communicated our findings to Michelle. After several weeks of back and forth e-mails and phone conversations as well as contacting her directly, we were finally reimbursed for the shortage. This issue should have been resolved immediately (or at the very most, a week) when it was first brought to her attention instead of it taking over a month.
We understand that people make mistakes and sometimes people have bad days. However, this is an excessive number of errors and in our opinion, completely inexcusable! read more