The Maryland Insurance Administration today announced a final action 31.03.02 regarding continuing education requirements for insurance producers. The effective date of this rule is February 1, 2023.

New York City was hit with an estimated $19 billion in damages and lost economic activity after Hurricane Sandy struck in 2012. The historic storm displaced thousands of residents from flooded homes, inundated subway tunnels, and left much of Manhattan in darkness. But when B.J. Jones talks about that disaster, he often focuses on a less dramatic storm impact — the storm surge that left the baseball and soccer fields at Battery Park underwater.

Read More [Contributed by Bill Collins, Frontier Abstract]

You were either born into this business, or you stumbled into it... Some of you remember the IBM Selectric Typewriter and Xerox machines, others might have to Google that. Whether you're an industry veteran or a newbie, you need to know your numbers to survive. In this episode, FNF's Chuck Cain invites Lodestar Software Solutions Founder & CEO Jim Paolino to offer his insight after growing up in a business where the only thing constant is change.

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Both the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois declared Aug. 16, 2022, to be Chicago Title and Trust Day. The day was established in recognition of Chicago Title’s role in rebuilding the city after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. During the fire, the official property ownership records of the city were destroyed. Chicago Title managed to preserve its records, which became the foundation of rebuilding the city.

More homeowners are beginning to expand across their neighborhoods — it's a way to keep developers from buying up houses, tearing them down, and creating eyesores. It's also a way to create more space for family and friends. Celebrities and rich investors have been doing it for years.

Week Ending May 13, 2022

This past May, the Illinois Legislature passed an amendment to Section 8 of the Conveyances Act to provide a form of executing a special warranty deed.

Each municipality has its own zoning procedures, under a broad set of state law principles. The municipality’s governing body first establishes a comprehensive plan, breaking the municipality into zones, each allowing only certain development and uses. The plan also controls such characteristics as square footage, height, open space requirements, and minimum distances between buildings or to property lines. In addition, historic landmark laws restrict development wherever they apply.

In Prather v. Callon Petroleum Operating Co., the court of appeals resolved a will construction issue that determined who owned certain mineral interests. No. 11-20-00189-CV, 2022 Tex. App. LEXIS 3200 (Tex. App.—Eastland May 12, 2022, no pet.). The decedent left all of her property equally to her two daughters and then stated: “In the event that one of the beneficiaries in this paragraph is not living at the time of my death, then his or her share shall go to the survivor(s) thereof.”

In Marshall v. Estate of Freeman, a trial court’s order admitting a will as a muniment of title forty-one years after the testator’s death was reversed. No. 03-20-00449-CV, 2022 Tex. App. LEXIS 2857 (Tex. App.—Austin April 29, 2022, no pet. history).

A Nevada homebuyer literally got more than she bargained for after ending up with an entire swath of lots in a subdivision in the west-central part of the state – while buying a single-family home.

The closing agent for the sale of a residential property in New Jersey was approached by a scammer, and funds were routed to the wrong party.

A 57-year-old widow was dealt a major blow when a Nkubu court in Meru County ordered her to vacate a 1.9-acre plot of land where she had lived since 1983. Hellen Ndumba has been ordered to vacate the land on which she built a house and lived with her husband, Luka Murithi, who died in July 2018. In addition to exhuming her husband’s body from the land, Ms Ndumba is unable to bury her son Paul Murithi on it, and his body has been at Nyeri General Hospital mortuary since July last year.

A husband and wife realty team from Wise County are headed to federal prison after they pleaded guilty to wire fraud in a scheme that netted them over $300,000 in commissions for sales that never existed. Jessee and Natasha Deloach, the owners of Koltown Properties, will now spend 15 months in prison, and pay $146,273 in restitution to the companies they defrauded.

For agents interested in growing their business by expanding into multiple states, we’re here to make the process simple and profitable. We offer you one point of contact to streamline your options and solutions.

In World War II, the Indian battalion known as the Fifth Gorkha Rifles fought for the British in Burma. One of the brave riflemen who went missing in Burma was named Chinta Bahadur. The battalion searched for him for days, and never found a trace of him. But a sheep found the Gorkha Rifles and followed them. The soldiers got used to the sheep and adopted him, naming him Chinta Bahadur, as if he were an incarnation of their lost colleague. They even made him a member of the battalion!

Our new window cleaner works remotely so we have to send him the windows one by one.

British railway companies are somewhat notorious for varied and often bizarre excuses for late-running trains. But even the hardiest of commuters is likely to have been taken aback when told that a giant tortoise was behind the hold up to their journey.

I’m a recent transplant from Chicago. What’s the deal in Portland with the random unpaved sections of road? It’ll be fine; then suddenly, for a block or two, it’s unpaved. Is this the result of some long-standing Hatfield-McCoy feud between a property owner and the city?

Märket is a small 3.3-hectare lump of rock located in the passage joining the Gulf of Bothnia to the Baltic Sea, between Sweden and Finland. The island is divided between the two countries since the Treaty of Fredrikshamn of 1809 defined the border between Sweden and the Russian Empire which ruled Finland at the time. When the border was drawn by the treaty’s authors, by sheer coincidence, it ran straight through Market Island.

Read More [Contributed by Bill Collins, Frontier Abstract]