As a buyer, I experienced 2 major issues with Five Star's handling of escrow/title. 1. From online searches, I'm finding that a common escrow fee in CA is that sellers and buyers are charged $250 each plus split 50/50 an escrow fee of $2 per $1,000... so for a 1M purchase price each side pays $2,250. However this company's escrow fee for buyers alone is $2.75 per thousand + $650, which comes out to $3,400 for the buyer. Meanwhile they give a discounted flat rates of $750 to sellers with repeat business. They claim the escrow fee IS being split 50/50... just with buyer paying full-price and seller getting a big discount 🤔. Including the other fees, I was charged $5,441 by Five Star for a 1.3M purchase. Five Star insists that their fees are "on par or lower than others." This is categorically untrue and they don't have any fee schedule document. 2. A couple days before closing I was the recipient of a fraud attempt. I received a scam email instructing me to wire funds to a criminal's bank account. The criminal posed as our Five Star escrow officer and knew the closing date and approximate wire amount. I can't know whose account was hacked for them to receive this information, but Five Star completely deflected the likely possibility that they have been compromised and claimed without evidence that it was MY email account that was hacked.