My lender is telling me to use their preferred title company but the quote came in $2,200 higher than the one I found
Shopping in Sacramento county, SFR around $480k, first purchase. Lender's preferred shop quoted $3,850 all in for the loan policy and escrow. The independent I called quoted $1,650 for the same loan policy amount, escrow included. That's not a rounding error, that's a different order of magnitude. I know RESPA says I can pick my own title company on a purchase, the lender can't force me, but I also don't want to slow down the file if their people are used to working with that lender's team and mine isn't. The closing is targeting 30 days out. The independent has decent Google reviews and has been around since 2011 but I have no personal read on them. Wondering how much the working relationship between a lender and a title shop actually affects timeline in practice, and whether $2,200 is the kind of number people here would just eat to keep things smooth or whether that's genuinely too much to ignore.
