"The Texas Land Title Association is disappointed that Insurance Commissioner Jose Montemayor severely cut the title insurance premium rate," Jack Rattikin III, president the of Texas Land Title Association, said in a prepared statement about the recent decision. In 1998, the board ordered a 3% cut. "This latest decision means that title companies will have to provide title policies and services at substantially less than what they were authorized to charge a decade ago," he explained in the statement.

With the decision cast in stone, some title insurance companies are lobbing a public relations play to alert customers of the change. Philip J. Shea, executive vice president of Fidelity National Title Co. in Dallas, has been kicking out e-mails and including the rate scale for the closing calculations.

"The people paying the fees would think it's a good thing because their costs are going to go down," Shea tells GlobeSt.com. But, the bottom line is it will cut into the reserves of doing business and ability to provide services, a fallout that is becoming more commonplace with the increasingly under-fire Texas insurance commission decisions. He points out that the bottom line for a $10-million transaction means title insurance would cost $45,585 instead of $48,494.