Empire West Title Agency (Sedona) W State Rte, Sedona

I see that my experience is aligned with one I read below. The glaring poor attention to detail, sloppy, haphazard way this Title Co. handled the closing of our pricey Sedona condo frankly had me traumatized to the point I was hoping the sale would fall apart to be able to start over with someone competent. First no documents were sent for my review for an out of state close without me asking repeatedly. Then I was assured someone was coming to my home to sit with me and guide me through a complex out of state closing involving a Trust. Instead, they just Fedex'd documents to my home with no forewarning which sat on my doorstep in the snow for 2 days as I was not there. They expected me to do a "self service" closing, figuring out all of these involved documents that were poorly marked with no instructions all on my own and get them notarized on my own and returned to them across the country for a closing two days later. Those documents were filled with so many errors, each page looked like a grade school child's graded spelling paper with whole sentences lined out and correct info written in the margins. Even the notary the next morning found more errors. No attempt was made to create a clean document as almost every page was filled with lined out items and handwritten corrections with arrows pointing back to the space. When I asked why they didn't send someone to my home to help me with this process as promised, I was told they decided to save me $250 without discussing this with me. This was over half a million dollars at stake, I would surely have paid that for the peace of mind that this was done correctly. I still don't have confidence that that paperwork won't come back to bite me some day. I was told prior to closing to sign a settlement form which was incorrect, as the "final" calculation of numbers knowing it would change when the closing occurred. I was in no way going to sign off something as final, that I had no way of signing off on once the correct figures were calculated. I had to direct them to, again with handwritten addendum, indicate this was subject to final tallies. Who does that on a legal document of this magnitude? Finally, the last insult, I was told to rush back my approval of the final numbers in order to close in time for the wire transfer to happen that day, which of course I accomplished. Gina Miller the escrow officer, indicated the funds would arrive "in the morning at the latest". The next morning the funds had not arrived, nor 24 hours later. I did some checking and realized they had filled out the wire form incorrectly, therefore my financial institution had to research this wire transfer to figure out where to place my funds which created the delay. The wire transfer instructions were clearly laid out in detail and sent to them by our wealth management and they still managed to screw it up. I wish I had not trusted the agents who referred me to these people. Now I need to take a hot bath and fix myself a stiff drink to recover from this nonsense.

I don’t know if our less-than-satisfactory experience with Empire West is representative. In our case, the lack of attention to details was totally unacceptable; e.g. the morning of closing we received an urgent email that there was another document that we needed to sign, they wired our funds incorrectly, and today I learned that they omitted the sewer payment due to the City of Sedona.

Great customer service. Very helpful staff. Kathy Dreiling did our transaction and she should get an award. Both the Realtors were asleep at the wheel and if it weren't for Kathy the deal would have fallen apart. She stayed on top of it until the entire process was complete. We have used her for years on all our transactions and there is no one as professional and efficient as she is, in our experience.

Always a pleasure doing business with Empire. Gina, Kathy and Allison are are extremely professional, and go above and beyond to get transactions completed. Highly recommend!

Title company with a sole! Very helpful and accommodating, they really care about you and your transaction. Worked well with our out of state schedule. I definitely would use them again.