Placer Title Company

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!

What can I say… there is an Old Republic Title in Auburn. Use it, I wish we would have.

Working with Placer Title was fine during the home-​buying process back in March 2013 (7+ months ago). It seemed like they did their job and everyone was on top of things. Being a first-​timer, the whole process was new to me and I trusted that an established company would know what they were doing.
After we closed escrow the problems started. First, my final documents and reimbursement check were mailed to the new home instead of my mailing address. This posed a problem. In order to obtain the key to the community mailbox, I had to show those papers to the Post Office… how the heck do I do that when the papers are in the box I’m trying to get access to?! Eventually I was able to obtain an electronic copy so that I could print it out and get the key a couple weeks later.
Then, I was told that Placer Title would be sending me a new reimbursement check because they voided the first one due to the mailing mistake. After a couple of weeks I had not received the new check (it should’ve taken only 1 day to get to me by regular mail) and I found out they never voided the original check and never sent a new one.
So, I could go ahead and cash it as long as I still had it (thankfully I hadn’t already destroyed it). That should have been the end of it, now I was a happy homeowner and I could shrug off the mailing mistake.
However, last month I received a call from their office notifying me that they «made a mistake on the calculation» and I owed them $ 150+ because they gave me too much on the reimbursement check. REALLY!!! First, your JOB is to do the calculations (we’re talking addition and subtraction here, not calculus). Second, why are you telling me this 6+ months after we closed escrow? (Insert rants and raves here)
I just now mailed a check to them to pay off the «amount due» after receiving an email from their office saying if they have to take a loss then they have to turn it over to their legal department. Seriously though? If $ 150 is the difference between loss and profit when your fees were over $ 1000 then you’re either A) full of crap or B) you have no idea how to run a business.
Lastly, don’t ever tell a client that you need to turn things into a legal matter, especially when you’re the ones who screwed up in the first place.

Love working with the staff from Placer Title. Thank you for helping us with our success.
Dean and Denise