HomeLight recently launched EVA, an artificial intelligence-powered escrow agent designed to automate most tasks required to close a residential real estate transaction.
And the company announced $40 million in new debt financing from funds managed by BlackRock to scale the platform nationally.
Drew Uher
A typical escrow requires upward of 120 discrete tasks that are time-intensive, difficult to coordinate and error-prone. HomeLight says that EVA automates most of them, from opening orders and pulling HOA documents to interfacing with lenders and wiring funds.
“When we look at the intersection of AI and title and escrow, it’s really staggering,” HomeLight founder and CEO Drew Uher told Inman. “We feel it’s effectively a foregone conclusion that this industry will be radically different in five to ten years, because there’s a lot of repeat back-office work that has to happen in order to close an escrow.”
From frustrated to ‘lights-out excited’
The product has been in development for roughly 19 months, with the first automated workflows going live in early 2025. Uher said accuracy climbed quickly from 25 to 30 percent at launch to the 80 to 90 percent range — and then stalled there for about six months.
“As recently as December 2025, I was honestly frustrated with the project,” he said. “I wasn’t sure if this was even a fully solvable problem.”
It apparently is. By the first quarter of 2026, Uher said EVA hit what is effectively 100 percent accuracy — first with one workflow, then another, then another.
“All four major workflows reached 100 percent accuracy between February and early May of this year,” Uher said. “We’re lights-out excited by this. We’ve now automated about 25 percent of the surface area of the escrow process, and it gives us confidence that we have line of sight to automating most of it.”
That framing carries a caveat: Uher defines 100 percent not as zero uncertainty, but as zero false confidence.
“When I say 100 percent accuracy, it’s okay if EVA encounters a truly weird corner case and says, ‘I don’t know how to handle this, I’m escalating.’ That can still count as 100 percent,” Uher said. “What I can’t have is EVA saying ‘I think I know how to do this,’ doing it incorrectly, and making a mistake. In title and escrow, you’re dealing with people’s money — often life savings — and the stakes are extremely high.”
Inside the EVA workflow
EVA stands for “Escrow Virtual Assistant.” Uher described it as a virtual employee, a collection of different AI agents. “The secret sauce is that we’ve built EVA over 80 different tools she can use to access the outside world and get real work done,” he said.
Uher was quick to mention that EVA isn’t a “chatbot experience.”
“We’re talking about an AI agent — or a collection of AI agents — that can actually go out and do things,” Uher said.
For example, EVA monitors the escrow officer’s inbox, waits for an open order request to arrive, opens the email and the PDF, and reviews them for 20-plus key pieces of information needed to open the order. Uher said that “she” then goes into the system of record and enters all of that information.
“If something’s missing, she contacts the agent directly — ‘Hey, I’m missing the buyer’s phone number, do you have that?’ — waits for the response, and adds it to the file,” Uher said.
Once the order is open, she emails the agent the order number, kicks off the title search process with the title vendor, kicks off the HOA process if one is associated with the file, sends intake forms to the buyer and seller, iterates with them if they have questions, and notifies the buyer where to send their earnest money deposit.
On the HOA flow, Uher said certain states have websites with databases of HOA documents. In Texas, there are two or three major sites that contain most of the state’s HOAs.
EVA can search those sites, pull up the relevant documents, and even use HomeLight’s credit card to purchase them on the company’s behalf. She also has access to hundreds of county tax and assessor offices and various regulators.
Things still on the EVA product roadmap include advanced title analysis, curative work, and signing scheduling. But EVA has also automated lender title requests, notary QC, post-close prep and several other parts of the flow.
The competitive window
HomeLight’s entry into title and escrow in 2019 predates the AI tools that are now making this automation tractable. Uher acknowledged the early years were slow going. All the relevant information in a typical escrow is stored on paper, and reliably extracting it required more robust AI models that didn’t arrive until 2023 or 2024.
The competitive window, he argues, is genuinely open.
“When you look at the title and escrow industry, it’s probably in the top 1 percent of all industries where AI can bring about real, meaningful change — and no one is really doing anything about it,” Uher said.
Uher continued that the “large incumbent players” generally aren’t technologists.
“No new startups are getting funded right now because of the state of the capital markets,” he said. “And the existing title and escrow players have largely been sold or merged. So there’s really no one innovating in the space right now.”
He noted that some software companies are building systems for title and escrow, but they have thousands of customers, each with their own workflows, so they’re building for all of them.
“We are an AI-first title and escrow agency with one workflow — our workflow — and we’re building technology to close escrows reliably, 100 percent of the time, on time, with 100 percent accuracy,” Uher said.
HomeLight is currently the only customer of its own technology. It’s not licensing EVA to other title agencies yet.
The bigger story
Victor Lund, managing partner at WAV Group and CEO of RE Technology, sees the launch as legitimately significant, but says the headline story may be underselling what’s actually at stake.
Victor Lund
“The data exhaust from escrow is enormously valuable,” Lund told Inman.
He pointed to the market capitalizations of data companies like Cotality and Black Knight as a frame for what HomeLight could eventually have access to if it scales.
“If you capture all this information at scale, you could license it to those companies or directly to capital markets players,” Lund said. “Brokers and agents don’t even think about the value of that data. They’re just processing transactions.”
Lund also flagged the security dimension. “If AI is handling wire transfer instructions, there’s no human with a screen that could be compromised,” he said, noting that wire fraud is one of the most common and costly forms of real estate transaction fraud.
Whether EVA is actually more secure than the status quo is unknown, he cautioned: “None of us have seen it yet.”
The bigger unknown, Lund said, is the go-to-market strategy.
“How do you sell escrow?” Lund said. “You have to retrain real estate agents and brokers. And first of all, brokers will want to use their own escrow company, so there’s built-in competition. The go-to-market is the hardest thing we don’t know about.”
HomeLight’s likely path, he said, runs through its 2020 acquisition of Disclosures.io, which became a standard listing and offer management platform for Northern California transactions.
“The play is: go to all those disclosures.io customers and say, ‘Would you like us to handle escrow for you?'” Lund said. “They can offer a lower price, better service, and as long as there’s no kickback or rev share, that’s RESPA-compliant. Just a better deal.”
‘That’s all profit’
Uher is direct about the labor implications but draws a line.
“Right now, 80 to 90 percent of the work we do in escrow is repeat back-office work that, frankly, no one wants to do,” he said. “AI can handle all of that.”
His framing for the humans who remain in the process: own one of two tracks. The first is an agent-facing service role — someone accountable to agents and clients when things go sideways, what Uher called “a throat to choke.”
The second is escalation and edge cases, the genuinely bespoke corners of a transaction that still need human judgment.
Lund put it more bluntly. A good escrow officer handles maybe 20 closings at a time. If AI handles the checklist work and a human handles the exceptions, that same officer could manage 100. “That’s all profit,” he said.
