Accelerating Solar Project Development by Streamlining Land Title Processes | EP198

Welcome to the Clean Power Hour live. I'm Tim Montague, your host check out all of our content at clean power hour.com Give us a rating and review on Apple and Spotify. Tell a friend about the show. And please reach out to me on LinkedIn. I love connecting with my audience. We do this for you. These live events now every month and we're dropping two sometimes three recordings a week. So check out clean power hour.com. Today, accelerate solar project development by streamlining the land title process. We are going to give you a deep dive on how you can accelerate your solar projects and boost ROI by fixing an overlooked bottleneck the title order and management process. In this webinar, we are going to discuss why siloed workflows cost time and money at critical junctures how decentralized processes create delays across teams, why manual tracking causes errors and duplication, how to automate ordering and prevent duplicate title searches and much more. Our expert panelists are Monroe Jett, CEO and founder of title leader. Monroe is a 35 year veteran of the real estate and title industry and I will let him make some quick introductory comments after I introduce our other panelists, who is Mike Koehler, who is the director of solar development with Azimuth renewables out of St. Louis. Mike leads the the Azimuth renewables Midwest utility scale solar portfolio with over eight years of experience in solar project development, acquisition, finance and asset management. And we got these two gentlemen together because one has created a Software as a Service and the other is a true blue fan and user of the platform. So welcome to the panel. Gentlemen.

Thank you very much. Glad to be here.

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Tim. I appreciate the invitation to be here today. Thanks to everyone who is attending. My brief bio is the first 15 years of my career was a banker and a bank president. I left the bank to serve my former competitors as my clients. I started a full service Title and Escrow Company which I've ran ran successfully for a second 15 year stint. And it was during the operation of my title company that I encountered the pain of handling a significant process that was not automated. And that was handling a bunch of clients that are not in the escrow world but that the title services. So I was providing them title services that we there was a significant, the second component was a communication component. And then we had to handle the third component which was accounts payable. So I automated that. So my title company rolled out my software to my clients, which were foreclosure customers. And then we over the last 18 months, we started picking up renewable energy developers solar wind storage developers that needed title work, and the exact same, exact same manner that foreclosure attorneys did. About six months ago, we changed all of our marketing and messaging to be directly focused on the renewable energy segment. They are quick to adopt and recognize the value of automation and technology and it's been a fantastic fit. So that's what brings us here today.

And I should mention that Monroe has been a guest on the show just earlier this year. So check out episode 192 with a solo interview with Monroe, and my killer. Welcome to the show.

Yeah, thanks, Tim. Thanks for having me on here. Happy to talk through the the issue of title as it relates to solar energy project development. Yeah, my name is Mike Koehler. I'm director of solar development for the Midwest region with Azimuth renewables. Azimuth is a St. Louis based utility scale. Greenfield solar developer. We are most active in miso and the Carolinas. With utility scale solar development we are typically take urging the site in signing up the site control agreement either a lease or a purchase option agreement For the solar project, and then doing the early stage development work, which includes title titles a pretty major aspect of what we do, in de risking a project. Before we, we typically sell a project or portfolio projects, to a long term owner or late stage developer, who then you know, goes and builds the project and owns it long term. We, as a myth has been around since 2019. And since then we've we've originated over two gigawatts of solar energy projects, again, in the Midwest and the Carolinas, and continue to have a very robust pipeline and keeping things organized, especially on the title side is, is an ever present issue that we have to manage, especially across the portfolio and across different states and making sure everybody's doing the same thing. Or at least, you know, in the same form. So, you know, I think that we've seen a lot of value in the title leader product that Monroe has created, in helping us manage that all in one place. And, you know, it's certainly been helpful for us, as we, especially as we go to sell a project and need to, you know, point to one single place that that our, you know, a buyer can can can see where the where the whole portfolio stands as it relates to title. Yep.

So let's, let's paint a picture for our audience. What is, what are solar developers doing today, for the most part, without a title Leader Platform? And what are some of the basic Delta's that they're going to experience? Once they onboard with a platform like title leader, maybe we'll start with human row.

What we found is our users are forced to come up with a DIY process to manage title. So title is a mandatory process, you get real estate land records on the property, the subject property that's going to be developed, these land records will tell the developers they could potentially find fatal flaws and in the land records, but it also will share with the developer where they can build where they cannot build. So it's a critical piece of de risking a project. And before they can get a notice to proceed typically is when most of our clients are then selling the project off, as Mike said. So before that can happen before funds can be advanced from a lender to buy a project didn't have to have a title insurance commitment performed so. So our customers are doing the manual process of ordering tracking, receiving, accessing, storing, and communicating back and forth and then four steps of Accounts Payable that's 11 mandatory steps that have to go through. And what we find is that customers are using a combination of methods whether you know, I refer to as band aids and paper clips. So you'll have spreadsheets and QR codes and handwritten notes and hardcopy folders. You can ask Mike out how he's done it. But also, you have non standard processes, everybody that is on the title team, whether you have a decentralized process, like one of our one of our customers, he's point energy has 12 different folks ordering title and suddenly have 12 different processes 12 different silos, the manager has no access to any of those. So that's kind of interesting. Then there's a centralized process where they have where you've got folks that may have three folks doing all the title work themselves, but they have three different silos. So it's interesting to see how everybody is we've seen folks use Smartsheet. We've seen folks try in a variety of different formats to use, but it's all it's, it can be anything and everything. It's interesting. Yeah,

the theme that your thoughts on the theme that really stands out here is fragmented, fragmented, today. It's very fragmented with tools and technologies. And tomorrow, it's centralized, and much more easily accessible to a bigger team, and especially to a layer of managers. But and then I just wanted to comment on something Mike said, you know, he said that Asmath has two gigawatts of projects under development. And, you know, the the queue for renewable energy in the United States is 2000 gigawatts. Now. We have a massive queue. And so there's tremendous pressure to find ways to expedite project development and reduce the soft cost and that's That's really why we're hosting this event. It's all about bringing down the cost of developing solar. So Mike, paint a picture for our audience what was as an Azmuth doing before title leader, and how did things change once she became a customer?

Yeah, you know, kind of the way that Monroe described, it is certainly something that we've experienced. You, you either have, you know, on our side, you either have, or what I see most of our companies do either have like an external title, Camp title consultant, who, you know, anytime you get a new deal signed up, you send it to them and say, Hey, go give me that title commitment, I'm gonna pay you a lot of money to go do all that and it becomes expensive, but at least that's off our plate, and we can't, you know, if we screw something up, it's not our fault. It's, it's the folks that we hired to do that. So there's that, or you can hire the title manager or something in house who can who can be your point of contact, and that, again, can be expensive, but again, it's all you know, it's out of the developers hands, and into someone who's more of an expert in the in the title area, and they're kind of your go to, in house title manager. You know, oftentimes you see paralegals be that person. And they usually wear a lot of other hats on the admin 100 administrative side, you know, drafting leases, and memorandums of leases, and managing court, courthouse and county recorder relations and stuff like that. And then kind of the other the other way of doing it, you know, at a smaller scale. And if you have a lien team, like what Azim that renewables is, you know, we can get by just just doing it ourselves as developers, and getting the title, commitment. And if we find issues from getting the title commitment, then we then we bring in the curative folks, security consultants at that point, but it's to solve whatever issues might might have arisen in the process. So there's kind of a multitude of ways that we have done it in the past. And we we have, we've had consultants in the past, and again, they're, they're pretty expensive, but they're, they can get the job done. And they have bandwidth issues, too, because they may be working for other other companies at the same time. And if we need to get title commitment, for some, for some closing, you know, the closing might actually get delayed, because we don't have the bandwidth on the title consulting side to do curative work or, or get the title commitment. So, you know, I think that's where title leader comes in as a really good kind of middle ground maybe that, you know, you have, you know, you can I can do, I can order a title commitment, as a developer without leaning on a consultant to go out and run that that kind of, you know, process with the with the title companies to get the title search done and get to commitment. You can do all that through through title leader and I don't have to create, you know, if we have three different developers and working in the miso region, you know, the product guy working in the north isn't, is not doing it on a separate spreadsheet, that the guy in the south and myself was doing it. It's all you know, everything runs through title leader, as kind of one sole source of truth, when it comes to title. And again, you're not you're not having to pay an outside consultant to manage all that or have somebody in house as the title manager. Managing that it's all it's all in one place. So that's where we've seen a ton of value from the title leader, product.

And Monroe, for those of us who are not title experts, would you describe for us some of the nuances of title because it's not as cut and dry? As cut and dried as one might think it is?

Yeah, we found thanks. Thanks for bringing it up. Tim, we find that our clients are across the spectrum have no clue about what title is, think that a title search is just a title search, all you have to do is pull up something on the computer that tells you everything that's on title, all the way to that we're dealing with very experienced title professionals that are hired by developers that run the land and title team inside the developer so So real quick, for those that don't understand title. The recording system in the United States is causing a lot of problems because that the way that it works, the United States and every all 3300 Plus counties and municipalities in the US does the exact same way that is they have a recording log. Alright. So the log is just when they receive a deed or lien against the property, they will record it on that log and make an official record. So So the log is created by humans, the documents that are recorded in this log are prepared by humans. And then that log is searched by humans. So you'll go back out whatever period of time it is in history and look and see what documents are recorded, then you'll look to see when a recording, sorry, every lease document is recorded. So you don't, nothing ever disappears from this log, the log is permanent. So if a lien gets filed on X date, 10 years later, they want to release it a release document has to be recorded. So do so when you're doing a search, you find all these liens that are of record and documents that have record. And then as you find the releases for them, you cross off those documents. And then whatever is left is what affects title. Right? So there's humans that inspect that log, right. So every time there's a human involved, there is a weak link. And that's where that's where defects can come about. So even if a perfect investigation of title has been taken care of the search back, let's say we had to go all the way back to patent in the 1800s on a particular property, because that's what the underwriter dictates. So what were formed that really long search of the property history. And we tell you what we found, well, guess what, that's all that we can find. And that's a perfect investigation. Let's say we, there's it's an absolute perfect inspection of that look, well, there are still potential problems out there that are not found not able to be found. And those are called the hidden and their defects. All right. So what are we gonna do about that? Well, there's this whole industry called Title Insurance, right? And so these title insurance companies, which are fortune 500, companies, they'll insure landowners against risk of hidden defects popping up at some time in the future, that were not able to be found in a title search. So that's why title insurance exists. And that's what title searches are. All right, so. So these title search reports, after you do this search, we, our vendors will generate a report that or a title commitment. That's what's delivered to the client. And of course, the clients are renewable energy developers. So our platform does two things. It's the automation, the automation of the process. And we're a delivery platform of the title products that developers needs. So we're both we're workflow automation, and a delivery platform for the for the products that they need. Does that answer your question about?

Yeah, that's great. That's great. So

I real quick, I was out in San Diego and Interstellar and met a potential client and we did a we had a call yesterday finally had a call after a couple of postponements. And he didn't understand that he thought all you have to do is look up because it wasn't so expensive. And he thought all he had to do is just pull it up on a computer to tell you everything that's on title, who owns it, what form they own it, what lands are there, what easements are there? It's like, no, no, it doesn't work that way. So one other thing, there's a series of things that that impact the price of a title search. One is how far back in the property history you're gonna go. And that's dictated by the underwriter not us. The second thing is, how hairy or difficult is that property? It could have all kinds of liens and issues on it, or it could be clean, squeaky clean, it can be able to be done fast. The third is, is that county is accessible by is it online? It can I accept it? Can I access that from wherever I am? Or do I have to send one of my people walking through the door to do the search? Right? So the accessibility issues like it's all those wrapped together have to do with how quickly something's going to get turned around and what the search cost is going to be. And

my sense, Mike is that there's somewhat of an iterative process here, when when you're developing a project, you're you're going initially after site control on sites that are in proximity to certain infrastructure that you're looking for, right, whether this is substations or transmission lines, or whatever. And then you have a pool of potential parcels. And, you know, your land man is is getting into dialogue and getting lease option agreements in place. But paint a picture for us, I guess, on how you perceive, you know, solar project development and the title, title infrastructure needs of a project over time. That's

right. You know, as I said earlier, ASMs renewables is a is a Greenfield, developer. pureplay, Greenfield, developer, early early stage developer, we sell projects at mid stage. One of our you know, our biggest value add is bringing, essentially what our what our highly qualified leads to long term asset owners out there who don't have the appetite for early stage risk on projects. And so that's what we do is we take on that early stage risk and identify good sites and de risk things like title, including environmental the interconnection strategy and, you know, the risk all these usually it's around four or five Main Categories of of kind of binary risk that we have to take off a project before, you know, there's a buyer interested out there and titles is a big issue when it comes to that. And the our processes, you know, we haven't invented, reinvented the wheel or anything like that, you know, our process is pretty similar to to other utility scale solar developers when it comes to site selection. And it's pretty similar to kind of what you described, Tim, and that, you know, we identify target, electrical infrastructure, and then and then, you know, have a thesis on how far away we can be from that. That electrical infrastructure at that point of interconnection, and then we started the outreach to landowners who have sufficient acreage for the size of project that we need to do that there. You know, once we've, once we've garnered some interest from a landowner and have started negotiating on a lease or purchase option, agreement, then we'll kick off our what we call our pre lease diligence, which which includes a what we call a preliminary title search, which is a title search that we do internally, here, given publicly available documentation, kind of what Monroe was talking about with pulling up what's it what's publicly available on the computer, you know, making sure that you're talking to the right, the right person who is the vested landowner, or landowners. And so, you know, there's a few common publicly public databases, that that these counties that Monroe was describing earlier, shared data with, one of the big one in the areas that we operate in, in the mid central United States is tapestry, which is also known as fiddler, which is also known as Laredo, I'm not Monroe probably knows more about that than I do. But I refer to it as tapestry. And, you know, when I'm developing projects in Arkansas Canaan title solutions is another one down there that that is a frequent go to for doing preliminary title search work. Iowa Land Records, there's Iowa land records.org, which has, I think, all 99 counties of Iowa, in it, and it's kind of one single source of, of these deed, this deed information. And so when doing a preliminary title search, yeah, that's the, you know, one of the first things that we do is just go try to find the, the vesting deed or the latest deed, that shows who the landowners are, and make sure that those landowners as they are listed in the deed are listed on the lease or the site control document that we have signed with them. Because if you if it turns out, there's three different landowners on listed on the warranty deed, on the vest and on the vesting deed, but you only got the you only got the brother and the sister but not the cousin who also owns 50%, then that that lease is not valid. And you don't technically have site control. And so that's that's mainly what we are doing at the preliminary title, search phase is, is figuring that out, and then also making a determination on what buildable acreage looks like. And that's where some of the stuff that Monroe was talking about when it comes to easements. You know, if if there's a pipeline running through your, your site, that's going to have like 100 foot wide easement, and you're not going to be able to put solar panels on that land and you want to find out about that information as soon as possible. Before you start investing a lot of money into the project and you know, end up losing that money potentially down the road, if you discover there's a pipeline underground and you know, you can't build there. But there so yeah, that those are the basic documents that we're trying to figure out and find in a preliminary title search as part of our pre lease diligence. Once we sign a site control agreement, once we get through the prelim preliminary title search work, we sign the site control document, then then we will kick off the title commitment work, you know, pay, pay a title search company, pay it pay a title company, to go out and do a do an official title search, which may uncover things that we weren't able to find from our preliminary work, including, you know, mineral rights is one big thing that that we run into a lot in the Midwest and southern Illinois and South West Indiana, particularly into Arkansas. That you know, sometimes those those documents, assignments of mineral rights don't get recorded with the county and they all need to be figured out because if again, if I'm if there's a coal lease on the land that hasn't been, for example, a coal lease that hasn't been you know, they haven't started mining yet. I go out and put a solar project on the on that land and then you know, if I Two years down the road, the coal company comes in and decides that they want to start strip mining the parcel that they had, you know, the first lease on the land, and then that puts a ton of risk on on our project. And so again, as an as an early stage developer, we're just trying to get a sense of what types of easements are out there, what kind of exists, other leases are out there, potentially, that could affect our ability to, or the, or the long term buyers ability to, to execute and build a project. Yeah. Right.

So So 10, there's basically three buckets of title work type that you can get, you can either go out on your own, like Mike was doing and search some tax records, or somehow try to find that deed. And you can do that on your own from a variety of public sources. Or you can order one from us for 100 bucks and get it back the next day. And you know, and you have 100% of the ownership represented in the vesting days, we also give you, so this is a search type, right, there's just an informational search type, it's all always done on the front end. So we have one client that there, the office within this client is solely responsible for getting leases signed, right. So they were these these informational searches from us all the time saves them a lot of time and effort. from going to a variety of different places, they can just order from us on our bucks turnaround a day, boom, you have a copy of the vesting date, you have a hand type legal description, because you can't do it via OCR. Because it's unreliable, the documents are typically faked and can be very old. So from our document and cut and paste that into the property addendum of the lease agreement, site control agreement done, and you're accurate, you know, who you're dealing with, you know what, whether it's an LLC, a Family Trust Corporation, we're individuals, and you get that data. So that's, that's the first type is just information alone, we the second type is what we call mid range searches. And those can be 30 to 60 years searches. And it's not just going to give you the info as to who owns the property, but it's also going to give you a list of all the liens and encumbrances, easements, all that kind of stuff. And it's a it's a mid range search mid length search, it can be 30 to 60 years typically in range Kentucky, it's 30 years Virginia is required is 60 years, I think North Carolina's 45 years. So anyway, so that's a mid length search. So it's going to give you every all the information we talked about in the very first one plus it's going to give you all the liens and encumbrances. And then the third and final bucket type of search work that you're going to order is the title insurance commitment. So you hop on our spreadsheet on our platform, upload a spreadsheet of all the parcels choose which underwriter you want it from but and get three quotes. And then your site you can choose. Right now you get one quote, but by next week, Mike, you're going to be able to get three quotes. And you can accept which one you want to go with. And then boom, the the document that pops up with the title searches and all the accompanying documents into your title, your platform. So let me give you an example. Moving on just an example of how this was used by Mike and then I'll have my comment. But you know, what's interesting about Mike is Mike signed up with us without seeing a demo. And we actually learned something that we need to follow up with any client who signs up on our on our dashboard and giving them an orientation demo to make sure expectations are correct, etc. And answer any other details. So Mike uploaded 12 commitment orders 114 parcels 12 Different Well, different spreadsheets for 12 title commitments with 100 114 parcels? And how are you going to track that right? Who you're going to what are those? What are all those quotes? From what quotes? Did you get back? What quotes Did you negotiate on? What price did you end up with? Where are you going to receive them, how you're going to name them? Where you going to store them? All that kind of stuff? So it was interesting that when we asked when I asked Mike, what's the the the core value, the most important core value that you've received from us? He said, organization you want to comment on that, Mike, if you don't mind me asking, like to comment on that? Yeah, that's great.

Yeah, organization and and being able to see the status of those title requests in one place is is, you know, where we see a lot of value. And then, and it sounds sounds like we'll be able to have kind of this idea of a marketplace for Title commitments in the past, you know, kind of going back to those three types of three ways of approaching title from a developer's perspective and the past of having, you know, either it's outside consultant in house title manager or doing it yourself as the developer, you know, in the latter category, you typically will fall back on your kind of favorite title search company or your favorite title provider, and there's, you know, neurocognitive tests. I think that There's only a handful who are who are doing this providing title commitments on a national basis for renewables. And so, you know, eventually, you'll just start, you'll just start leaning on that that same data provider, which is not bad in itself, but then, you know, there may be some pricing differences that your efficiencies that you're not realizing by by running more of like a bidding process with the different providers. And so, you know, I think that's, you know, where you want one, one way you can, you can, you know, get be a better efficiency, in with with Title leader is having that kind of bidding process run, with run for you. And then also seeing just, you know, once he wants to pick one to move forward with, and you get to see where it's data. So that is, and, you know, not, there's pricing, and there's also turnaround time as well, which can vary drastically by by state and by provider, you know, some provider might might have access to the database for Michigan and the others have to go pay somebody else to get it, and that's going to take a long time, or they have to send somebody out to the county because it's, you know, they only have hard records on file. It's not, it's not digitally uploaded, and so that that provider might, you know, it might take them, you know, 10 times longer to turn around a title commitment for you. And so, again, that's, that's a thing that I think title leader is, is great at realizing those efficiencies.

I think that's great that you point that out, because people will go to Joe Blow title company and ask for a search, and they've paid for that search, they don't know what the quality of it really gonna be. They don't have the experience of understanding the universe of abstractors, or searchers. And then when it goes, they're gonna get a title company that's unusable because they're not approved by the title search underwriter, or the title insurance underwriter. So we've eliminated those problems for our users by having the largest commercial title search vendors in the nation on the back end of our platform, that are approved by all the title insurance underwriters have superior quality there. They meet all the certifications, if you're familiar with them, a sock one and sock two certifications, those are$60,000 $80,000.02 month audits by third parties to make sure you're you're doing what you say you're going to do your product is what you say it is your quality, blah, blah, blah. So these are the 800 pound the 200 pound gorillas and in the nation are on the backend of our platform. And they give consistent reasonable pricing. And we're also adding a third here then. So we're going to have the three biggest in the United States. And so you're going to be able to get three quotes, which is the marketplace as Mike might discuss. So Mike was about the fourth or fifth user asking for multiple quotes. And so we're implementing that at the moment and can't wait to have that rolled out for you.

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I've got a huge one that jumps off the page. Do you mind if I go first? Go for it. So So one of the one of the big things we do is we get our users out of these workflow silos that I talked about that are inaccessible and non transparent, so managers have no clue what's going on with any other employee of their employees work. They can't monitor it. They don't know what it is. It's anecdotal evidence and we had a I guess it was fourth quarter last year we brought on a new customer, and she was the title lead for their company. and her prior company, there were two folks, she and one other gentleman who was 39 years old, they handled all of their title work, they were both in big silos. They're both in different locations. So all this gentleman's title work was in his laptop, he was in a one car accident and died and very unfortunate circumstance, 39 years old. And so, the company meanwhile, every one of the projects that he was dealing on, were delayed by over three months. Because you had to get, they had to get the essentially, actually, they had to perform a forensic audit, to try to figure out what he had ordered from who, when at what prices, what problem, the resolutions, were the process of doing all the problems that have yet to be identified, more the payment situations, everything, they could not get the laptop from the family in a timely fashion, because they're grieving. They have personal data on the laptop, it took forever, for them to get that and then to recreate all the work. It was a significant blow. And she was she had moved on to a new company and was searching for something in solace and got a demo. And so she shared that story with us that it was an absolute nightmare. So that's worst case scenario being in silos. You ask for a horror story. That's one. And very briefly, the minor a smaller horror stories are if you have employees that are that are sick on vacation, they've been fired, they've left the company, and you don't know what's in that employees silo, you can't access it, you have to duplicate all the work, you have to duplicate fees, you got to find out what nightmare anyway, so slowly eliminate that. But that is a worst case scenario that I just shared. I

mean, it sounds to me, like a lot of companies are probably even using email as their database, so to speak for workflows. Yeah.

They're even using trying to use Salesforce, some combination of sales, the most sophisticated, we found, are using Salesforce, some combination of smart sheets. And then they have to copy everybody on an email. And then they have specific naming requirements for the documents and specific naming locations. But I had at my company, I had seven people wondering title and commitments. And everybody, even though we had training on you're supposed to save it under this naming convention in this location. In variable, we had seven different processes. We had multiple locations, and saving all different naming conventions was a nightmare. So that's why I automated it. But anyway,

my I've seen I've seen order gets I've seen title get ordered twice on the same project by the same company.

Yeah, we had a customer do that before. Yeah.

So it's paid for two level commitments on the same project?

Yeah. So yeah, each of them cost like 10, grand or 20,000.

You know, we we've, we've we've covered a lot of the ground that we wanted to cover. But from your perspective, Monroe, when you think about what the status quo is today, I mean, this is why you created a title leader, and you truly are an expert in title search. What else should people know? And what is it that? I guess developers are not necessarily thinking about? When when it comes to this and the cost of decentralization?

Well, there's never been an automated option before. So they're, they're thinking, why should I make a change? I'm gonna just keep doing it as is. And then they have to be aware of the issues. You know, I have a list of questions that I asked that I asked customers, they're like, can I had thought about that? So those would be you know, how do you assess productivity from from your team and your individuals? And you know, who needs coaching? Do you have access to their workflow? The invariable answer is always no. How do you? How do you ensure workflow continuity, when someone's unavailable? You have to solve a problem. So those are the questions that I see. But the biggest issue is they're unaware of a of the, that there is an automated option that can save a tremendous amount of time, weeks, even months per project, which is considerable. So to solve that problem, we're about ready to do a fundraise and hopefully, if, if and when we are successful, you will see a lot more of us and calling attention to that problem. That's that's the biggest issue is education on the problem.

I'm curious Mike, you know what your own experience has been? Either at Azimuth or or in other roles. You know, when it comes to modernizing the real estate processes of solar development, what what do you what do you see as the opportunity and and the challenges to overcome?

The biggest challenge is that, that there's just no way, I don't want to sound pessimistic, but there's no way of standardizing it across states across it for every single situation that you're ever gonna face. Because title can be, you know, very unique problems to solve, and your dt and then, you know, going back to maybe some nightmare stuff. Previously, you might, you know, you might find an oil lease on your land, and you reach out to those, that oil company and, you know, they don't want to wait their surface rights, or they want you to pay a lot of money in order for them to do that. You know, there's no way to automate, you know, unless, unless we come up with some, you know, very well developed AI system, to automate that negotiation with that oil company to to get them to waive their surface rights on the land. So, you know, I, but but there are a lot of ways to, you know, better organize it, and then I'll say that this is kind of a ubiquitous problem across all categories of product development, is it standardizing processes, on the environmental side, on the interconnection side, these are inherently things that are they're just different in different jurisdictions. And it's tough to standardize them across the, across the board for all folks doing it, and then you got different personalities and different ways of working on your, on your staff, as well. So, you know, we use Smartsheet, as, as kind of, you have to have some kind of single source of truth, to point to when managing a team and a company. And Smartsheet is what we use, it's a it's an affordable platform, you know, other folks use Salesforce, but you know, our, our perspective on that is that we just don't have the volume of sales that to justify the cost. That's a pretty expensive platform to try to implement. And so that's, that's how we've done it. But yeah, like I said, it's, it's tough to find standardized ways of doing things across a company, when, when you're when you've got such varying jurisdictions, you know, we tend to, we tend to put things into like, this is how we do things in miso, this is how we do things in the Carolinas. So by RTO, there's some there's some standardization that makes sense to implement. But, you know, again, you're not going to, there's going to be significant differences between, you know, standard operating procedures for different regions.

How does that impact your your work in terms of developing the platform and row handling all these different jurisdictions is not a factor.

It, it is a factor, but it's easily overcome by working with the largest vendors in the nation that have solved that nut for us through partnerships and brick and mortar within certain states. They've bought up the what we what we call dirt knowledge in the industry. So they've bought and partnered with other title companies and search vendors in those states where it's difficult, where you have to, you know, for example, the most difficult states are Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Washington. You could argue that North Carolina and South Carolina are Georgia because they're all attorney on states. But that's been that's that's been cracked for for some time for us by having attorney partners in all those states to be able to provide us what we need. So so our search vendors on the back end of our platform have got that solved. So one, one stop, you get everything. Could have been a couple of questions answered or asked me I still on track when you want to ask something and worry?

Well, I had I had before we do that. I had a question for Mike. You know, when you think about a, let's just say 100 megawatt project, that's kind of the, the the lower end honestly now for utility scale solar in the United States. There there is this middle zone where you see 10 to 50 megawatt projects occasionally, but it's very, it's very bifurcated. There's community solar in the in five to 240 acre, and then you jumped 200, which is for all intents and purposes, 500 acres of solar farm, right. buildable and then they go up to 15,000 acres. Right. That Project in Indiana, mammoth solar, I think he's 15,000 acres. So projects are getting very large. But when you think about 100 megawatt project, Mike, what kind of an improvement in In efficiency might a developer experience by adopting a platform, this software as a service, like title leader, do you think

that, you know, 50,000 acres or 100 megawatt solar project, you know, all things equal the more parcels that you have on a project, the more the more likelihood there is that there's going to be some title, curative work that needs to get done. And so, you know, I think that's, that's really, that's, that's probably more of an indicator of title risk, just, again, all things equal is number of parcels, you know, you could have a 1000 acre project that that has, like two parcels, and, you know, the likelihood of there being defects on those two parcels is lower than having, like, you know, Iowa is, is basically all 48 your squares. And so you got, you know, I've 1200 acre project that I'm developing right now, that's got 31 parcels, and, you know, over time, those those change hands differently, the title chain of title looks very different on 31 parcels, so that, you know, I would anticipate seeing more title risk going into that project with more parcels, than I would like on a on a smaller, you know, as much as we do, we do develop those, those smaller kind of 20 to 100 megawatt range, just called the distribution interconnection projects. And, you know, most of the time, those are, like 140 acre, parcels on the low end. And usually, that's one parcel and the title is, you ideally, we can figure out what from the preliminary title source work that I talked about earlier, you know, any kind of risks that are exist on that project and have a lot more comfort going into that project versus a project with 31 parcels and, you know, five different landowners five different chain of title that we have to track. And I think that's, that's the key thing is, is, you know, having having one, one place, where you can see how those giant chain of title, how that chain of title works, or one place where you can go to, to find the documents that show that which I think is what title leader does, you know, all the, all the title commitments, will are posted in there, and you can find them and, you know, somebody didn't take, you know, if we were using Dropbox, or use Dropbox, you know, somebody didn't take that folder out of that file and move it somewhere else. And nobody can find any more. You know, it's all kind of one place, and it's stuck there unless Monroe moves it. So that's, that's, yeah, I think that's the key. They get really complicated. As you as you described him on the bigger projects, you know, 15,000 acres, that that's gonna take a team to manage that one. So yeah, it's great to have that, you know, a platform that that that is specific to title to help manage it, because that's a, that's a challenge with Smartsheet is okay, it's a great, it's a great tool. It can be adapted for, you know, really, really almost anything. But you have to do that yourself. And whereas title leader, it's already set up to four title.

And we have a question from the audience. How can we use the software to keep track of specific title exceptions that we are trying to clear what does that mean to clear an exception,

there are a variety of things that are found on title that can negatively impact what the developer wants to do. So they've got to get rid of that. That problem. That's what an exception is. So just being secure the problem, you've also heard curative work, that's what we're talking about clearing exceptions, that problems that are founded on title. And a problem can be can span the spectrum of something that's pretty easy to just have to get to, but yet still take care of that means get a release filed or get some sort of issue resolved. Alright, so to answer the question in your title commitments that will be delivered posted to your dashboard, you get an email alert, a text alert, that you that it's at your dashboard, boom, you log in, there it is, it's gonna be right in front of you. So you can find that as soon as you see it visually. You can find any commitment or any title work by looking up any data that was in the spreadsheet that you uploaded. So it's a fully relational database, fully searchable. You can find anything in milliseconds. So instead of hunting through inboxes and E folders and hardcopy folders, boom, it's right in front of you. So how do you manage it? Well, you see the exceptions there and then since since sort of work is very time considered time consuming and heavy on the communication, that's that takes place outside of our platform. So you'll email phone call the underwriter you'll have full full contact information there. For for who, for the underwriter that's that you've chosen. And you guys can work through what's needed to clear that Then, once you provide the underwriter the documents to clear those, the underwriter will reupload for you a new title commitment and get the rid of the old one. Right? So, so you always have the cleaned up version that's going to be entirely for you later on when you go to order a pro forma title policy, if, if you're there, we're going to where you're actually going to get a loan on the property, you're going to manage the property, then you're going to need to get a title policy. So you get a pro forma title policy up front to show you what it's going to look like. Right and then after the the closing takes place, and the money is issued to fund the project, then you'll have the actual FTP, the final title policy, both those get uploaded into title your for you see you have on your title work per project right easily findable in one spot. Does that answer your question? Anonymous attendee?

We have, let's

assume that it did. The other question was, which title insurance underwriters are available? All of them is the answer. We've got, you know, fidelity, first American Chicago Commonwealth. AmTrust. I'm leaving an old republic, Stewart, even independence, title, title Best you name it. So we've got them all in there. And if you want to if there's some smaller one that you deal with that you want us to add? Not a problem, just let us know. And we can make that happen.

Monroe, that maybe this is a stupid question. But why didn't somebody do this sooner? The value proposition seems so compelling. There's no additional cost for a developer to onboard this platform. And the organization of it all, you know, through a browser just seems like it's the convenience is off the charts.

I don't know what it had been done. I know that I was receiving all this search work. And I knew that I had to go through a ridiculous effort to track everything, and to communicate and to get accounts payable. And I knew that my client was having to duplicate 100% of that effort. And I thought there is no reason for this not to be automated. I'm an efficiency not. And I'm like, there is no reason it shouldn't be automated. And so I was misled, it was gonna cost me 30 grand to get this automated. So I started automating it. And I'm a half a million bucks in and there we go. So I think maybe that was foolish, and I think that's why.

Well, in our last few minutes, Mike and Monroe, you know, I would love to hear a little bit from Mike about what is it like to onboard this platform? And what do you say to other developers who would consider trying something new?

Right now it's, it's pretty simple. You go in and you create your account, you can you can add team members, other other you know, you have one, I think admin for the for the company. And then you can add team members, and everybody can see that you can you can see your projects, you can see the whole company's projects, different views. And yeah, to to order to order a title commitment, you think it's just a matter of, of updating basic, or uploading basic information about about the site, parcel numbers, and then that, that goes to the title company to, you know, get back to you with the quote, which you then approve. And you get to give you a, quote, turnaround time you approve it, and then you know, it, I can't remember to renew if, if, if there are automatic notifications sent out, like if the if the title company is not being responsive? Does it? Does it ping you send you an email as a user to you know, go go ping that the title company to get back to you on what they said they were going to get back to you? Yeah,

yes, we have automatic alerts, automatic reminders to them that we've implemented to help prevent a non responsive underwriter and what's interesting under underwriters Go ahead sir, you know, some of them will respond and a day, others will respond in in two or three weeks and so you know, who you want to work with.

I was gonna ask, how, how the title companies have have bought in on the title leader product.

That's it? That's a great question. They absolutely love it because they title underwriters don't make any money off searches. It's a pain to climb. except our workflow, they don't like handling title searches. So they end up performing, they turn around and send them to the largest vendors in the nation, which we have on the back end of our platform. Those vendors won't accept, if you go straight to them, they're not going to accept you because they want orders on a daily basis, you have to be high volume to work with the vendors we have on the back end of our platform. And those are the biggest vendors that all the title insurance underwriters use. Okay, so we given you're giving you access to those vendors? And gosh, what was what was your What was your the part of your question? Like?

What's the buy in, like from the title from the title? Providers? Right?

Right. So they don't, right, thanks for getting me back on track. So they don't, they don't perform title searches. And they so they outsource them either they outsource them to platform they have in house, which is rare. So we're title has that which is good. The rest of them don't. So they are. So we're about ready to roll out some functionality specifically for developers, sorry, specifically for underwriters, where they can just send the orders right into title later and will fulfill a form to take that heavy left off of their shoulders, which is this was going to be huge for us. And they're also going to be begin referring clients. At least these three underwriters are out of the seven are going to start referring clients to sign up accounts and use us and talk to them about the benefits of it. So underwriters, love it. I got asked, you know, where have you been? It was, was a was one of the email responses, you know, I expected them to me. But frankly, I suppose it'd be difficult to deal with and that they're going to be hard to ask but the one of the first ones like we've been waiting for a guy like you to come along that was like that was the email we've been waiting for. So So that's great. So they love it, which is fantastic. So not only they liked our customers using it, they liked it the control that it still gives them they're able to work with you could make a phone call to you to determine the scope of your project and determine what search specs then they up on the search specs we give quotes. They like it that it helps them.

You might be wondering, how do you see an eye solar PPAs get financed? For many it remains a mystery. For others, there's conductor, conductor solar helps hundreds of developers and EPCs. Find investors close transactions and collaborate effectively. With competitive bids from high quality partners. Conductor make sure you and your customers get the best PPA deal every time free to use for developers and EPCs visit conductor.solar today. I'll remind our listeners that you can get a free demo at titleleader.com. There's a recorded demo or you can sign up for a live demo. And we'll be sending out a recording of this with links to both Monroe's and Mike's LinkedIn profiles and websites. So check out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com. Please give us a rating and a review on Apple and Spotify. Subscribe to our YouTube channel. Reach out to me on LinkedIn I love hearing from my listeners. And with that I want to say thank you to Monroe Jett, CEO and founder of Title Leader and Mike Koehler, Director of solar development for Azimuth Renewables. I'm Tim Montague, let's grow solar and storage. Thanks, gents.

Thank you. Thanks, Jim.

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