Why are rates on SALE?

I was visiting with my sister over the weekend and she's a real estate agent so I asked how she liked our new title insurance rate calculators. She said she liked the calculator but didn't understand the SALE rate. When was the sale over and what would the rates be then? WOW. That's a great reminder and lesson about how words that make sense if you have inside information can mean something entirely different if you don't have that information. What am I talking about?

The new TIRBOP rates which go into effect today, July 1, 2012, are categorized as SALE or NON-SALE.  Gone are the old words we knew, BASIC and REISSUE.  For most transactions this is all you need to know:


SALE = purchase
NON-SALE = refinance

Since my goal with our newly designed web site is to make what is said here consumer friendly, I decided to change our calculators to simply say PURCHASE and REFINANCE. I removed the words SALE and NON-SALE because YOU don't care about insider TIRBOP kinda stuff, YOU just want to know what your title insurance premium will be, right?

So, here's a hug to my sister, Claire, for helping me help YOU.  ;)

dc