Mark Casale : No, it’s fair enough, right? I mean I think that you did hit the nail on the head. It is going to be a longer-term build. Very much like Essent, and I think I alluded to it on maybe the February call. But the acquisition of Title was not dissimilar to us buying the Triad platform back in 2009. It kind of gave us that base to build off. We inherited some exceptional employees. And when you kind of marry the platform and the folks from Triad that came over to Essent with the existing Essent folks, that really laid the foundation for building of Essent. And here, that was in 2009 — and I was probably 18 — almost 24 months from starting to raise the money. And that’s 2009, we didn’t break even in 2012. So when we came public in 2013, we were already fully formed, and that’s what investors got to view.
This is going to play out differently, right, because it’s going to play out in public. We’re going to be very transparent. But in order to build out these type of businesses, it’s going to take time. We acquired a platform. We’ve got some really good folks, right, a really good team. But in order for us to build it and have it to like Essent infrastructure, we’re going to have to invest. We’re very risk and control oriented. I mean, you’re talking — this is a company where we hired our Head of Internal Audit before we hired our first salesperson. So we’re very much control oriented. And there’s a lot of risk entitled in terms of the search process, the curative process, the closing and funding. I think from the 30,000 feet people think there’s not risk in Title and it’s entirely bad premise and there’s risk and we have to understand it.
So we’re going to build it from the inside out, and we’re going to take our time. It’s going to play out. I’m going to be transparent, but we’re not going to skimp on investments in order to show quarterly results. So we have to report every quarter. We will report every quarter. We’ll talk to you about it, but we’re not going to change the approach that build us and taking a step back to me here again, think about it, right? This is a company $150 million a quarter we’re earning cash flows, $600 million, $700 million a year for us to take a few bucks to invest in a business that has the potential of on the title side. I think it’s a really good risk return trade-off, risk reward trade-off for shareholders. So again, that’s how we’ll continue to look at it, and we’ll certainly — we’ll let you know how the journey goes every 90 days.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from the line of Rick Shane with JPMorgan.
Richard Shane : Two questions on 2 pretty different topics. Mark, one of the things in terms of the Title insurance business, and I’m going to draw an analogy here. 20 years ago when Capital One got into the building depository franchise, one of the things that they emphasized was that scale was not — or efficiency was not a function of being on having a national footprint but being concentrated in particular regions where they could generate substantial market share. How do you guys look at the Title expansion? Do you want to be a national Title Insurance company? Or is the plan to be really concentrated regionally as you build the business?
Mark Casale : Yes. I think the answer is both. And the reason why, Rick, really it’s the business and as we acquired 2 separate businesses. So we’re in the process of putting it into 1 kind of functional organization, as entitled. So we’ll have the agency services channel, which will service title agents. And that will be focused on large states, right? I mean it’s pretty obvious where the premiums are coming from Florida, Texas, within the Southeast, parts of the Southwest and Northeast — and there are — and so we’ll focus around that and build around that and build around that. The agency services has 200 agents that they service today. So it’s really tiny. We’ll grow that out, and we’ll scale that out very similar to how we scale out online, right?
