Miami-based proptech company Propy is no longer just talking about putting real estate on the blockchain. That is to buy the title company.
In the months since taking on a $100 million line of credit from Metropolitan Partners Group, the blockchain and AI proptech has completed multiple title and escrow acquisitions, acquiring Delta South Title in Alabama in November, Vos Law’s title division in Florida in March, and has more acquisitions in the works. The company announced in January that it had built a pipeline of approximately $75 million in additional targets.
The targets are profitable, local title and escrow companies with annual sales of between $5 million and $20 million across California, Texas, Tennessee, Florida and other states.
“Acquired companies will be upgraded with automated workflows that reduce manual workload by up to 70 percent and use blockchain as the infrastructure to support auditability and payment security,” the company said in a statement.
The line of credit transaction was announced in late January by Metropolitan Partners Group, a private investment firm that provides situational financing to small and unsponsored businesses in the United States.
ripe for consolidation
The U.S. title insurance industry will generate $16.2 billion in premiums in 2024, according to the American Land Title Association, and is dominated by the so-called Big Four: Fidelity National, First American, Old Republic and Stewart.
What remains is a growing long tail of independent underwriters and local title and escrow companies in every county in the country. The total market share of independent underwriters rose from approximately 15% in 2019 to 26.6% in 2024.
Integration is not a new story. What is new is the funding structure and the AI theory layered on top of it.
Propy itself pegs the addressable market at $25 billion, which is a combination of title premium and adjacent escrow and settlement activity, which exceeds ALTA’s actual premium data. But the numbers support the argument that the category is fragmented and ripe for consolidation.
Propy targets companies with strong local relationships, retains their teams, and layers automation stacks in their back offices. The pitch to acquirers is operating leverage, while the pitch to Metropolitan is that automation will increase margins for already profitable companies.
But until now, this category has been difficult to disrupt. Doma, a venture-backed title startup that promised near-instant Refi closings powered by machine learning, went public via SPAC in 2021 at a valuation of $3 billion, but its stock price fell about 97% and was acquired by Title Resources Group in September 2024.
Propy’s debt financing can be read as a deliberate departure from the venture-funded software model that didn’t work.
“Never Sleep” Escrow Officer
This automated part is called Agent Avery, and Propy describes it as the real estate industry’s first AI escrow officer. The company says Avery handles tasks that make up about 70% of a human escrow agent’s workflow, including monitoring incoming emails, initiating transactions around the clock, verifying bank accounts and making outgoing calls to lenders and homeowners associations.
The company says Avery has been trained on Propy’s own trading history and is built to operate within RESPA.
“She’s an escrow officer who never sleeps,” Natalia Karayaneva, founder and CEO of Propy, told CNBC. “This is omnichannel communication, and she can communicate with our buyers, sellers, REITs, institutional investors, and even vendors, including ordering mortgage payments from vendors.”
According to Propy, pilots of Avery at acquired companies have reduced manual effort by up to 70% and increased profits. These are vendor-provided numbers and there are no independent benchmarks yet.
The displacement subtext is the part worth noting. Escrow personnel are a small, specialized workforce. As of May 2024, the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted only 49,760 rights examiners, abstractors, and investigators nationwide. This represents approximately 3 percent of the real estate agent population based on 2025 reported National Association of Realtors membership.
However, the escrow officer stands at the gateway to any real estate transaction. If Propy’s numbers hold up at scale, this could be a story of layoffs playing out in the fragmented and largely invisible parts of the closing.
blockchain layer
Propy can’t help but lead on the blockchain part. The mechanics are real, even if narrower than the marketing suggests.
Once a signed purchase agreement arrives, Propy’s AI extracts the contract data and a smart contract triggers an on-chain closing workflow. The company claims that in pilots, closings that previously took weeks now take hours.
Propy also runs an actual asset tokenization product, PropyKeys, and has PRO tokens. The company passed through NAR’s REACH accelerator in 2019, and the industry group’s venture arm invested in it.
The GENIUS Act of 2025 created a federal framework for stablecoin payments and gave a clear footing to the real estate infrastructure for cryptocurrency payments, even though tokenized real estate itself is largely unregulated at the federal level.
As of mid-2024, Propy said it had minted more than 200,000 digital addresses, including about 80,000 in the United States, representing more than $10 billion in asset value, although “minted” refers to on-chain registration, not tokenization or trading.
Minting a digital address is not the same as recording a deed with the county recorder. Propy has completed transactions recorded both on-chain and in county registers in a small number of jurisdictions. But how many companies cross 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 Rollup continues to acquire local title and escrow companies in agent-heavy metropolitan areas, agents in those markets may end up closing deals through companies equipped with the company’s AI system, Agent Avery, in their back offices.
Whether that means faster closings and fewer balls being dropped, agents will start finding one transaction at a time.
Karayaneva’s stated ambition is to expand the annual U.S. home sales market from its current pace (4.06 million existing home sales in 2025, a 30-year low, according to the National Association of Realtors) to nearly 20 million units by making transactions quick and cheap enough to release pent-up activity.
But a more modest version of the thesis, in which title and escrow can be integrated and partially automated through credit lines and recruitment pitches, appears to be coming true.
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