HomeLight just lately launched EVA, a man-made intelligence-powered escrow agent designed to automate most duties required to shut a residential actual property transaction.
And the corporate introduced $40 million in new debt financing from funds managed by BlackRock to scale the platform nationally.
Drew Uher
A typical escrow requires upward of 120 discrete duties which might be time-intensive, tough to coordinate and error-prone. HomeLight says that EVA automates most of themfrom opening orders and pulling HOA paperwork to interfacing with lenders and wiring funds.
“After we have a look at the intersection of AI and title and escrow, it’s actually staggering,” HomeLight founder and CEO Drew Uher advised Inman. “We really feel it’s successfully a foregone conclusion that this business will likely be radically totally different in 5 to 10 years, as a result of there’s a whole lot of repeat back-office work that has to occur in an effort to shut an escrow.”
From annoyed to ‘lights-out excited’
The product has been in growth for roughly 19 months, with the primary automated workflows going stay in early 2025. Uher stated accuracy climbed rapidly from 25 to 30 % at launch to the 80 to 90 % vary — after which stalled there for about six months.
“As just lately as December 2025, I used to be actually annoyed with the undertaking,” he stated. “I wasn’t certain if this was even a completely solvable drawback.”
It apparently is. By the primary quarter of 2026, Uher stated EVA hit what’s successfully 100% accuracy — first with one workflow, then one other, then one other.
“All 4 main workflows reached 100% accuracy between February and early Might of this 12 months,” Uher stated. “We’re lights-out excited by this. We’ve now automated about 25 % of the floor space of the escrow course of, and it provides us confidence that we have now line of sight to automating most of it.”
That framing carries a caveat: Uher defines 100% not as zero uncertainty, however as zero false confidence.
“Once I say 100% accuracy, it’s okay if EVA encounters a very bizarre nook case and says, ‘I don’t know easy methods to deal with this, I’m escalating.’ That may nonetheless rely as 100%,” Uher stated. “What I can’t have is EVA saying ‘I believe I understand how to do that,’ doing it incorrectly, and making a mistake. In title and escrowyou’re coping with individuals’s cash — typically life financial savings — and the stakes are extraordinarily excessive.”
Contained in the EVA workflow
EVA stands for “Escrow Digital Assistant.” Uher described it as a digital worker, a group of various AI brokers. “The key sauce is that we’ve constructed EVA over 80 totally different instruments she will be able to use to entry the surface world and get actual work completed,” he stated.
Uher was fast to say that EVA isn’t a “chatbot expertise.”
“We’re speaking about an I have an agent — or a group of AI brokers — that may really exit and do issues,” Uher stated.
For instance, EVA displays the escrow officer’s inbox, waits for an open order request to reach, opens the e-mail and the PDF, and opinions them for 20-plus key items of knowledge wanted to open the order. Uher stated that “she” then goes into the system of report and enters all of that info.
“If one thing’s lacking, she contacts the agent immediately — ‘Hey, I’m lacking the customer’s cellphone quantity, do you’ve that?’ — waits for the response, and provides it to the file,” Uher stated.
As soon as the order is open, she emails the agent the order quantity, kicks off the title search course of with the title vendor, kicks off the HOA course of if one is related to the file, sends consumption kinds to the customer and vendor, iterates with them if they’ve questions, and notifies the customer the place to ship their earnest cash deposit.
On the HOA stream, Uher stated sure states have web sites with databases of HOA paperwork. In Texas, there are two or three main websites that comprise a lot of the state’s HOAs.
EVA can search these websites, pull up the related paperwork, and even use HomeLight’s bank card to buy them on the corporate’s behalf. She additionally has entry to lots of of county tax and assessor workplaces and varied regulators.
Issues nonetheless on the EVA product roadmap embrace superior title evaluation, healing work, and signing scheduling. However EVA has additionally automated lender title requests, notary QC, post-close prep and a number of other different elements of the stream.
The aggressive window
HomeLight’s entry into title and escrow in 2019 predates the AI instruments that are actually making this automation tractable. Uher acknowledged the early years had been gradual going. All of the related info in a typical escrow is saved on paper, and reliably extracting it required extra sturdy AI fashions that didn’t arrive till 2023 or 2024.
The aggressive window, he argues, is genuinely open.
“Whenever you have a look at the title and escrow business, it’s in all probability within the prime 1 % of all industries the place AI can result in actual, significant change — and nobody is admittedly doing something about it,” Uher stated.
Uher continued that the “massive incumbent gamers” usually aren’t technologists.
“No new startups are getting funded proper now due to the state of the capital markets,” he stated. “And the present title and escrow gamers have largely been bought or merged. So there’s actually nobody innovating within the area proper now.”
He famous that some software program corporations are constructing methods for title and escrowhowever they’ve hundreds of shoppers, every with their very own workflows, in order that they’re constructing for all of them.
“We’re an AI-first title and escrow company with one workflow — our workflow — and we’re constructing expertise to shut escrows reliably, 100% of the time, on time, with 100% accuracy,” Uher stated.
HomeLight is at present the one buyer of its personal expertise. It’s not licensing EVA to different title companies but.
The larger story
Victor Lundmanaging accomplice at WAV Group and CEO of RE Know-how, sees the launch as legitimately important, however says the headline story could also be underselling what’s really at stake.
Victor Lund
“The information exhaust from escrow is enormously priceless,” Lund advised Inman.
He pointed to the market capitalizations of knowledge corporations like Cotality and Black Knight as a body for what HomeLight might ultimately have entry to if it scales.
“In case you seize all this info at scale, you can license it to these corporations or on to capital markets gamers,” Lund stated. “Brokers and brokers don’t even take into consideration the worth of that knowledge. They’re simply processing transactions.”
Lund additionally flagged the safety dimension. “If AI is dealing with wire switch directions, there’s no human with a display that could possibly be compromised,” he stated, noting that wire fraud is among the commonest and dear types of real estate transaction fraud.
Whether or not EVA is definitely safer than the established order is unknown, he cautioned: “None of us have seen it but.”
The larger unknown, Lund stated, is the go-to-market technique.
“How do you promote escrow?” Lund stated. “You need to retrain actual property brokers and brokers. And to begin with, brokers will need to use their very own escrow firm, so there’s built-in competitors. The go-to-market is the toughest factor we don’t find out about.”
HomeLight’s probably path, he stated, runs by means of its 2020 acquisition of Disclosures.iowhich grew to become a typical itemizing and provide administration platform for Northern California transactions.
“The play is: go to all these disclosures.io clients and say, ‘Would you want us to deal with escrow for you?’” Lund stated. “They will provide a lower cost, higher service, and so long as there’s no kickback or rev share, that’s RESPA-compliant. Only a higher deal.”
‘That’s all revenue’
Uher is direct in regards to the labor implications however attracts a line.
“Proper now, 80 to 90 % of the work we do in escrow is repeat back-office work that, frankly, nobody desires to do,” he stated. “AI can deal with all of that.”
His framing for the people who stay within the course of: personal certainly one of two tracks. The primary is an agent-facing service function — somebody accountable to brokers and shoppers when issues go sideways, what Uher referred to as “a throat to choke.”
The second is escalation and edge circumstances, the genuinely bespoke corners of a transaction that also want human judgment.
Lund put it extra bluntly. An excellent escrow officer handles perhaps 20 closings at a time. If AI handles the guidelines work and a human handles the exceptions, that very same officer might handle 100. “That’s all revenue,” he stated.
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