He's a fan

California Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner has a busy day ahead of him today. He's holding a press conference down in San Diego to publicize a ruling that homeowners insurance companies can't reduce claims payments to policyholders who lose their homes in a disaster and decide they want to rebuild somewhere else. Wildfires destroyed more than 1,700 homes in San Diego County last year (see San Diego Union-Tribune for details on the ruling).

After the press conference, Poizner will address members of the California Land Title Association (CLTA) at their 101st annual convention. At last year's event, Poizner lauded a new Web site CLTA was planning to roll out to help consumers shop for title insurance. Poizner liked the site so much, in fact, that he ended up postponing his predecessor's plan to roll back title insurance rates by $1 billion, and put a link to the CLTA's TitleWizard Web site right on the California Department of Insurance's home page (he's pictured above with CLTA officials at an Oct. 9 press conference announcing the launch of the site).

Since TitleWizard went on line, CDI has stopped supporting its own title insurance rate survey. The department helps consumers shop for other lines of insurance by publishing rate surveys for auto, homeowners and long term care insurance. The CDI's own title insurance rate survey, however -- which in some ways looked more thorough than TitleWizard when I compared them last fall -- hasn't been updated since 2006, and is pretty much impossible to find. The Department has addressed one concern I had at the time: that consumers weren't being told that they were being taken away from the state's Web site and to the industry-sponsored TitleWizard when they clicked on "New! Compare title insurance rates!"

A disclaimer now informs consumers: "You are now leaving this site to link to another website location that is not maintained by the California Department of Insurance. The CDI takes no responsibility for and has no control over non-CDI sites."

With HUD proposing RESPA rule changes that could serve as incentives for consumers to shop for settlement services like title insurance, we will soon be seeing more sites like TitleWizard (see story) -- whether they are able to convince regulators to link to them or not. In its April newsletter, CLTA says TitleWizard has handled more than 9,000 visitors, "including individuals from both Canada and Mexico."

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