A lot of memorable things happened in 1984… Apple introduced the MacIntosh computer. John McEnroe beat Jimmy Connors to win the Wimbledon Championship. Prince released his “Purple Rain” album, and Bruce Springsteen launched “Born in the USA.”
1984 was also the year when Loren Harrell, a software programmer from Raleigh, NC started his company in his garage and named it SoftPro. With the introduction of IBM’s Personal Computer in the early 1980’s, Loren recognized an opportunity to develop software to perform calculations and print documents related to real estate closing transactions. In the early days Loren did it all as he wrote the software and traveled throughout the Southeastern United States to sell and support the software.
With the founding principle of “No matter how good your software is, you have to provide excellent support to back it up,” SoftPro gained traction adding its 1000th customer site in 1992, and today boasts over 17,000 installations. The nation’s largest provider of closing, title and escrow software, SoftPro is now owned by Fidelity National Financial and is used by agents of numerous regional and national underwriters.
