What "Cheap" Actually Means in This Industry
The signing service you chose because it was the cheapest option is probably costing you more than you think.
Not in dollars on the invoice. In time. In missed scanbacks. In the phone calls you make to your client explaining why the closing is delayed. In the re-signs you eat. In the deals that almost fell through because nobody caught the mistake on page 12.
Title companies pick a signing service the same way they would pick a plumber for a quick fix. They look at the price, pick the lowest one, and move on. That logic works for a leaky faucet. It does not work for a transaction with hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line.
I run The Closing Signing Service. My team and I close transactions for title companies across the country, and I will tell you what I see every single week.
When you pay below market rate for a signing service, you are not getting a discount. You are paying a different way.
The signing service has to make money somehow. So they make it the only way they can. They underpay the notary, who is the person standing in front of your borrower with hundreds of pages of legal documents. They cut every operational corner that does not show up on your invoice, like document review, scanback verification, and appointment confirmation. And they bill you back for the rest in fees you did not see coming. Print fees. Travel fees. Fuel surcharges. "Did not close" fees. Re-sign fees.
The cheapest line item on your monthly invoice is rarely the cheapest closing in your pipeline.
Where Cheap Signing Services Break Down
I have title agents call me asking the same thing. How do I switch our signing service without disrupting our pipeline? When I ask why they are switching, the answers are almost always identical.
The notary did not show up on time. The scanback was sent four hours late and we missed funding. There were notarial errors on the package, and we had to do a re-sign. The notary called the borrower directly to clarify something and confused the entire transaction. The drop-off never happened and FedEx had to be expedited at the title company's expense.
Each of those moments has a real cost that nobody puts on a spreadsheet. How much time did your team spend on the phone fixing the problem? How many emails went back and forth? How much did your closer's day get derailed?
If you put a real number on the time your team spends fixing what a cheap signing service broke, the savings disappear. And if you ever lost a client because of one bad closing experience, the savings are negative.
What Underpaying a Notary Really Buys You
When a signing service competes on price, somebody is being paid less. That somebody is the notary at your borrower's kitchen table.
What you get when you pay below market rate is a roster of notaries who will accept any job at any price. Notaries who have never invested in Notary Signing Agent training. Notaries who do not do this full-time and squeeze closings in between other work. Notaries who will not refuse a remote location even when the gas costs more than the job pay, which means they cut corners somewhere else to make the trip worth it.
This is not a judgment about every individual notary. There are excellent notaries who occasionally take low-paying work to build their pipeline. The problem is the system. A pricing model built on underpaying the notary selects for inexperience and corner-cutting by design.
The notary is the last line of defense before your documents come back. If that line of defense is the cheapest option available, you are betting your transaction on luck.
Three Signs Your Current Signing Service Is Costing You Money
If you want to know whether you have a problem, look at your last 90 days.
How often is your closer chasing the scanback? If the scanback is consistently late, your signing service is the bottleneck on your funding timeline, and your closers are absorbing the cost in their day.
How often is your client mentioning the signing experience as a problem? Borrower complaints are a quiet leak. They do not always cancel a deal, but they shape every referral your client does not send you next year.
How many touches does it take to close a single file with your signing service? Count the emails, calls, and messages your team sends after the appointment is set. The fewer touches, the better the signing service. If your team is spending real labor coordinating each closing, that is salary you are paying to compensate for what your signing service is not doing.
Three patterns. If you see any of them in your pipeline, your cheap signing service is more expensive than you think.
Three Questions That Expose Any Signing Service in Five Minutes
If you are reviewing signing services right now, here are three questions to ask on the first call. The answers tell you everything.
What do you pay your notaries per signing? You are listening for whether the answer is at, above, or below the market rate for an experienced notary in the borrower's area. If they are paying their notaries less than what an experienced professional would accept, you are looking at the same problem we just walked through.
Who reviews the documents before they go back to the title company? You want to hear that a real person on their team reviews each package, not the notary checks them and not we trust the notary. The notary is checking their own work. That is not quality control. That is hope.
What happens when something goes wrong at the table? Wrong document. Missing party. Wrong notarial certificate. Borrower not at the address. Listen for whether they have a process for these situations or whether they are going to call you to figure it out together. The signing service that has not built playbooks for these moments is going to make you build them.
Three questions. Five minutes. You will know exactly who you are dealing with.
What Good Actually Looks Like
A good signing service is not a vendor. It is an operational extension of your title company.
That means the team handles the appointment confirmation. They review the package before the borrower signs and again after. They verify the scanback. They track the drop-off. They are bilingual when your borrower needs them to be. And they have a real person on the other end of the phone when something goes sideways, because something always goes sideways eventually.
You should be able to forget your signing service is even part of the transaction. That is the whole point. You hired them so you would not have to think about it.
The Bottom Line
Cheap signing services are not actually cheap. They are subsidized by your team's time, your reputation, and the closings that almost did not close.
The signing service is not a commodity. It is the last operational layer between your file and your client's experience of your firm. When that layer is built on the lowest price possible, the whole transaction is exposed to risk you cannot see until it is too late.
If you want to talk about what your current signing service is actually costing you, or you just want a second opinion before you sign with someone new, email me directly at melina@theclosingsigningservice.com. I read every email myself.