Escrowing Property Tax/Insurance

[Jeffrey Vegh]

Hi all! I wanted to get everyone's take on how you handle management of property taxes and insurance in your properties. If you have a mortgage, the lender will likely open an escrow account to handle that, but if you purchase the property in cash, how do you manage those payments? There are no options currently to escrow those payments for you if you don't hold a mortgage. 

If given the opportunity to have your taxes escrowed, is that something that people would generally take advantage of?

Full disclosure - I'm working on creating an escrow product for non-mortgage homeowners and am trying to gauge whether this is something the market would want. I would love to hear the input from this community on whether this is a problem that you would like to see solved. Knowing that banks do not allow homeowners to escrow once the mortgage is paid up (or if there's no mortgage to begin with) is a huge gap and leads to a lot of people either missing tax payments or sticker shock when the payments are due (since most people generally do not know how to save appropriately).

The idea for my product would give people the same convenience as a traditional bank escrow account, with certain added benefits including: 

- higher offered interest rates (as opposed to close to 0 with traditional servicers)

- lower 'cushion' needed (meaning, less cash sitting in the account)

- ability to use multiple modes of payment (e.g., credit card, crypto, etc)

- ability to use the account as a general savings account with high yield as an option

Hoping to get some input/feedback. If given the opportunity to build your ideal escrow product, what would you want to see it have?