Back to Work

Title Insurance Rate Calculator

Building a scalable rate calculator platform for a national title insurance underwriter

/ Back End Development / Dev Ops / Front End Development / UX/UI Design / Web Application Development
Visit the site
01/01

Intro

Title Resources Guaranty Company (TRG) is a national title insurance underwriter that supports thousands of title agents across the United States. Agents rely on TRG’s online rate calculators to estimate premiums for title insurance policies across different state and county jurisdictions.

But behind the scenes, these calculators were difficult to maintain. Each state calculator had been built individually with hard-coded logic, making updates slow and heavily dependent on engineering resources.

Bilberrry partnered with TRG to design and build a scalable Rate Calculator Builder web application that empowers TRG’s internal team to create, configure, and maintain rate calculators across jurisdictions without ongoing developer support.

The result: a powerful platform that simplifies complex insurance logic, improves the user experience for agents, and enables TRG to expand calculators across the 38 states and thousands of counties where it operates.

The Goal

Enable TRG’s subject matter experts—not engineers—to build, update, and publish insurance rate calculators adapting quickly to regulatory changes and business growth. The system needed to meet the industry’s unique complexities, while maintaining a consistent and accurate product, and intuitive user experience, for title agents and partners.

The Challenge

Title insurance rate calculations are complex.
Each state, and often each county, has its own regulatory rules governing how premiums are calculated. These rules incorporate numerous variables, including:

  • Jurisdiction (state, county, region)
  • Property type (commercial, industrial, multi-family, single family, etc.)
  • Transaction type (purchase vs refinance)
  • Owner and lender policy types
  • Sale price and loan amount
  • Reissue credits from previous policies
  • Optional endorsements and other add-on products
  • Bundled policy pricing
  • Premium allocation between owner and lender(s)
  • Jurisdiction-specific rounding rules and tiered pricing structures

Historically, TRG had built individual calculators for a limited set of states. These tools were difficult to maintain because each calculator contained hard-coded logic, so adding or updating calculators required engineering support. Scaling the system to cover additional jurisdictions, or reacting to policy and industry changes was slow and resource-intensive.

Moreover, the calculators varied significantly in interface and user experience, leading to unnecessary friction and frustration for internal users and customers alike.

The Approach

Bilberrry worked closely with TRG subject matter experts to map the complexity of title insurance calculations across jurisdictions and policies.

Through discovery sessions and analysis of rate tables and policy manuals, the team identified the common patterns that could be standardized and the edge cases that required flexible configuration.

Key design goals included:

  • Simplify the end-user experience while preserving regulatory accuracy
  • Reduce engineering dependencies by empowering TRG staff to manage calculators themselves
  • Standardize inputs and outputs across jurisdictions where possible
  • Design a scalable architecture that could support future quoting tools and additional functionality

This required designing both a public title agent interface and a powerful internal configuration system capable of modeling complex calculation rules.

01/01

The Solution

Bilberrry developed a custom Rate Calculator Builder, a web application that enables TRG to create and manage calculators for each jurisdiction.

The platform includes two applications and interfaces:

Agent-Facing Calculator

The public interface allows title agents to quickly generate estimated premiums by entering transaction details such as:

  • State and county
  • Property type
  • Transaction type
  • Owner and lender policy types
  • Sale price and loan amount
  • Date of previous policy
  • Optional endorsements

The calculator returns a detailed breakdown of the estimated title insurance premiums, including:

  • Owner policy premium
  • Loan policy premium
  • Second loan premium if applicable
  • Closing protection letter
  • Total premium estimate
  • Closing disclosure results
  • Allocation of premiums between owner and lender

The interface was designed to streamline complex calculations into a clear, intuitive experience for agents who need fast, reliable estimates during real estate transactions.

Admin Configuration System

The heart of the platform is the internal calculator builder used by TRG’s operations team.

Instead of requiring developers to implement each state calculator manually, the system allows TRG administrators to configure calculators directly by defining:

  • Jurisdiction parameters and policy options
  • Policy rate tables and liability tiers
  • Calculation formulas and multipliers
  • Rounding rules and intervals
  • Endorsement pricing logic
  • Reissue credit calculations
  • Simultaneous issue rules

Admins can preview and test calculators before publishing, ensuring that complex rate logic works correctly across jurisdictions. Once validated, calculators can be published instantly, allowing TRG to quickly respond to policy updates and market changes.

This architecture enables TRG to add or modify calculators across jurisdictions without code changes, dramatically reducing the time required to maintain or expand the system.

Technology

The application was built using a modern, scalable web architecture, including:

  • React / Next.js
  • Node.js with NestJS
  • GraphQL
  • PostgreSQL
  • AWS infrastructure

This stack enables the platform to scale as TRG expands its digital tools and quoting capabilities.