Study reveals closing cost differences
By Holden Lewis • Bankrate.com

When you're getting a mortgage and you want to pay the lowest fees possible, Wyoming is the place to live, and you should stay away from New York.

Wyoming had the lowest mortgage-related fees and New York had the highest in Bankrate.com's 2005 survey. That's without taking taxes into account.

To get a $180,000 mortgage on a single-family home worth at least $225,000, the average buyer in Laramie, Wyo., would pay $2,101 in origination fees, title insurance and other closing costs. The average buyer in New York City would pay almost twice as much: $3,907 for the same size loan. Nationally, the average fees and title insurance totaled $2,748.

Bankrate surveyed nine to 15 lenders in each state, plus Washington, D.C., and asked them to estimate the closing costs on a $180,000 loan to a buyer with an excellent credit history who had made a down payment of at least 20 percent on a single-family home in the state's largest city. The survey showed that:

• The biggest differences among states came from the wildly varying costs for title insurance;
• fees for settlement services and title searches accounted for much of the rest of the disparities;
• origination costs -- the fees that lenders control -- didn't vary much from state to state (but they did differ from lender to lender).

How to comparison shop for a mortgage
You should compare mortgage offers by adding up all the origination fees and all the title insurance and settlement fees. Ignore taxes and prepaid items when comparison shopping -- lenders don't always estimate those correctly, and they'll be roughly the same for each lender, anyway.

But costs differ substantially from state to state. New York claimed the highest costs for title insurance, an average of $1,451. North Carolina had the cheapest title insurance, at $439, followed by Wyoming, at $461. The national average was $756.

"Title insurance -- why does it cost more here? It's kind of hard to say," says Rafael Castellanos, managing partner of Expert Title Insurance Agency, in New York City. But he is willing to hazard some guesses: Property is expensive in New York, the city is densely populated and homes are bought and sold frequently. All of these factors can increase a title insurer's risk.

On the other hand, Castellanos says, "In Wyoming, land is wide-open," with fewer transactions and less opportunity for fraud. Buyers, sellers and lenders are more likely to know one another. Contrast that to Miami-Dade County, Fla., where mortgage fraud is rampant and, not coincidentally, title insurance is costly.

"And some states simply represent greater risks associated with doing business there," says James Maher, former executive vice president of the American Land Title Association, the lobbying arm of the title insurance industry. Some states, such as Arkansas and Mississippi, have a regulatory or judicial climate that's not friendly to title insurers. Other states are riskier because of their real-estate laws or customs.

Different flavors of title insurance
There are other reasons for price variations, Maher adds. Some places have "all-inclusive" title insurance, where the price includes not only the insurance premium, but other services such as title search, examination of title, closing and other settlement services. Other places are called "risk-only" jurisdictions, where the insurance premium is itemized separately from related services.