True Title, headquartered in Clayton, Missouri, is led by industry veterans John Duckworth (president) and John Banjak (general counsel), and has satellite offices in Frontenac, Chesterfield and Festus. In addition to Duckworth and Banjak, the company has fourteen full time employees and two part time employees to service its residential and commercial client base. The company, founded in 2012, is jointly owned by Duckworth, Banjak and Alton, IL-based Community Title & Escrow, Ltd. (“CTE”). CTE provides back-office support in the form of accounting, human resources and information technology. In addition, CTE manages and operates QDraw, Inc., joint venture amongst the CTE and True Title which provides construction disbursing services to its member companies, including True Title.
True Title is underwritten by Chicago Title Insurance Company and Old Republic National Title Insurance Company, two of the largest and most respected title insurance companies in the country – a reflection of the knowledge, experience and quality Duckworth, Banjak and the entire True Title team bring to the table.
Our clients include residential and commercial real estate agents and brokers, mortgage bankers and loan officers, homebuilders, investors, speculators, developers, attorneys, utilities and government agencies. We are equipped to handle the simplest raw land transaction of only a few thousand dollars to a complex, multiple-phase, multi-million dollar commercial development.
John Duckworth
President
General Information, Closing and Title Matters
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John Duckworth is the president and managing partner of True Title Company, LLC, a full service residential and commercial title agency based in Clayton, Missouri, with operations in Missouri and Illinois. He received a BS in Marketing and BA in Spanish from the University of Missouri. Mr. Duckworth is a distinguished veteran of the title insurance industry; he has served on the education committees for both the Missouri and Kansas land title associations and served on the Board of Directors for the MLTA. He is a regular instructor for continuing education programs in the real estate & title industry, and he also prepared the Study Guide for the Missouri Department of Insurance Title Insurance Producer’s Examination, the accepted study guide for new title professionals across the state of Missouri. Prior to his beginnings in the title industry, Mr. Duckworth worked in Prague, Czech Republic as a global networking consultant for a venture capital firm. In that position, he helped locate start-up software firms for investment, and manage these firms’ entries into foreign markets around the world.
John T. Banjak is a graduate of Washington University School of Law and Indiana University School of Business with over twenty years of diverse legal and business experience in the areas of real estate, title insurance, banking and general business transactions. As a respected title attorney well-versed in all aspects of real estate law, particularly in settling competing claims of ownership and control over real property, John serves as a consultant to various real estate professionals, including his peers in the legal community. He has legal expertise in the following subject areas:
• Commercial Real Estate Development
• Municipal Zoning Applications/Compliance
• Real Estate Financing, Including Public/Private
• Commercial Title Insurance Underwriting
• Condemnation
• Construction Financing, Disbursing & Lien Laws
• Quiet Title Actions
• Tax Sale Properties
• Foreclosures
• General Title Curative
