Miami-based proptech company Propy is no longer just talking about putting real estate on the blockchain. It’s buying the title companies.
A few months into deploying a $100 million credit facility from Metropolitan Partners Group, the blockchain-and-AI proptech has closed multiple title-and-escrow acquisitions — Delta South Title in Alabama in November and Boss Law’s title division in Florida in March — and is moving on to more. The company said in January that it had built a pipeline of about $75 million in additional targets.
The targets are profitable, locally rooted title and escrow firms doing $5 million to $20 million in annual revenue across California, Texas, Tennessee, Florida and other states.
“Acquired firms are upgraded with automated workflows that cut manual workloads by up to 70 percent, with blockchain used as supporting infrastructure for auditability and settlement security,” the company said in a statement.
Metropolitan Partners Group is a private investment firm that provides situational capital to small and mid-sized non-sponsored businesses in the U.S., and the credit facility deal was announced in late January.
Ripe for consolidation
The U.S. title insurance industry generated $16.2 billion in premium volume in 2024, per the American Land Title Association, and is dominated by the so-called big four: Fidelity National, First American, Old Republic and Stewart.
The rest is a long tail of independent underwriters and local title and escrow firms in every county in the country, and that tail has been gaining ground. Independent underwriters’ combined market share has climbed from roughly 15 percent in 2019 to 26.6 percent in 2024.
Consolidation isn’t a new story. What’s new is the financing structure and the AI thesis layered on top.
Propy itself pegs the addressable market at $25 billion, a figure that bundles title premiums with adjacent escrow and settlement work and exceeds ALTA’s actual premium data. But the directional argument that the category is fragmented and ripe for consolidation is supported by the numbers.
Propy is targeting firms with strong local relationships and retaining their teams, then layering its automation stack on the back office. The pitch to acquirees is operating leverage, while the pitch to Metropolitan is that automation widens margins for already profitable businesses.
The category has been difficult to disrupt in the past, though. Doma, the venture-backed title startup that promised near-instant refi closings via machine learning, went public via a SPAC in 2021 at a $3 billion enterprise value, saw its stock collapse by roughly 97 percent, and was acquired by Title Resources Group in September 2024.
Propy’s debt-financed roll-up reads as a deliberate departure from the venture-funded software model that didn’t work.
An escrow officer who ‘never sleeps’
The automation piece is named Agent Avery, which Propy describes as the first AI escrow officer in real estate. The company says Avery handles work that consumes roughly 70 percent of a human escrow officer’s workflow, such as monitoring inbound emails, opening transactions around the clock, checking bank accounts and making outbound calls to lenders and homeowners’ associations.
Avery is trained on Propy’s proprietary transaction history and built to operate within RESPA, according to the company.
“She is an escrow officer that never sleeps,” Propy founder and CEO Natalia Karayaneva told CNBC. “It’s an omnichannel communication where she can communicate with our buyers, sellers, with REITs, institutional clients, and with vendors, such as ordering mortgage payouts from vendors.”
Propy says pilots of Avery at acquired firms have produced up to 70 percent lower manual workloads and higher margins. Those are vendor-supplied figures, and there is no independent benchmark for them yet.
The displacement subtext is the part worth paying attention to. Escrow officers are a small, specialized workforce. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted just 49,760 title examiners, abstractors, and searchers nationally as of May 2024. That’s roughly 3 percent of the Realtor population based on the National Association of Realtors membership reported in 2025.
But escrow officers sit at the chokepoint of every real estate transaction. If Propy’s numbers hold up at scale, this may be a workforce-reduction story playing out inside a fragmented, mostly invisible part of the closing.
The blockchain layer
Propy can’t help but lead with the blockchain piece, and the mechanics are real, if narrower than the marketing suggests.
When a signed purchase agreement comes in, Propy’s AI extracts the contract data, and a smart contract spins up the on-chain closing workflow. The company claims that, in its pilots, closings that historically took weeks now take hours.
Propy also runs PropyKeys, a real-world asset tokenization product, and has a PRO token. The company went through NAR’s REACH accelerator in 2019, when the trade group’s venture arm took a stake in it.
The 2025 GENIUS Act, which created a federal framework for payment stablecoins, gave crypto-settled real estate infrastructure a clearer footing, even if tokenized real estate itself remains largely unregulated at the federal level.
As of mid-2024, Propy said it had minted more than 200,000 digital addresses, including roughly 80,000 in the U.S., representing more than $10 billion in property value, though “minted” refers to on-chain registration, not tokenization or transaction.
Minting a digital address is not the same as recording a deed at a county recorder. Propy has completed transactions that were recorded both on-chain and with county recorders in a handful of jurisdictions. But how many have crossed that line at scale, in which jurisdictions, and with which title underwriters, remains an open question.
What this means for real estate agents
If Propy’s roll-up keeps acquiring local title and escrow firms in agent-heavy metros, agents in those markets may eventually find themselves closing deals through a company whose back office is powered by the company’s AI system, Agent Avery.
Whether that means faster closings and fewer dropped balls is something agents will start finding out one transaction at a time.
Karayaneva’s stated ambition is to expand the U.S. annual home-sale market from its current pace — existing-home sales totaled 4.06 million in 2025, a 30-year low, per the National Association of Realtors — to something closer to 20 million by making transactions fast and cheap enough to unlock pent-up activity.
But the more modest version of the thesis that title and escrow can be consolidated and partially automated with a credit line and a recruiting pitch looks like it’s already happening.