It’s like the old joke about screwing in a lightbulb … How many people does it take to close a simple real estate transaction? There’s the closing agent, the escrow agent, the title agent … maybe a settlement agent, a title processor, a title insurance agent … What do these people even do? Are they just different terms for the same thing? First things first — although what happens behind the doors of the title office may seem obscure, it is very necessary. Title complications are common; title offices solve dozens of problems in every transaction so you don’t have to.