An escrow is an interval with a bank account. The buyer has agreed. The seller has agreed. The building, business, liquor license, stock certificate or stack of documents has not quite changed hands. Money waits in the middle while a long list of conditions becomes true. Most days this resembles administration. On the wrong day, it resembles bomb disposal with a fax machine.
Commerce Escrow Co built a company inside that interval. Its officers receive funds and documents, follow the parties’ instructions, coordinate with lenders, brokers and title companies, and release what they hold when the deal’s conditions are satisfied. The Los Angeles firm specializes in the transactions most likely to grow extra limbs: commercial and industrial property, tract sales, stock transfers, bulk sales, liquor transfers, residential property and holding escrows that do not involve real estate at all.
The premise is almost comically unfashionable. There is no claim that an app has abolished complexity. The current website publishes direct phone numbers and email addresses for eight escrow and exchange officers. When a closing becomes peculiar, the product is a person who has seen a similar peculiarity before.
The expensive space between yes and done
Phil Graf and Mark Minsky started Commerce Escrow in 1980. Both had been executives at Title Insurance and Trust Company; each had managed escrow operations in Los Angeles County. Their advantage was not a secret algorithm. It was accumulated pattern recognition. A contract could look ordinary to the parties and still contain a title issue, a civic requirement or a timing conflict that would stop the closing.
The company’s language has barely moved from that insight. It talks about anticipating obstacles, responding quickly and avoiding a “cookie cutter” process. That phrasing can sound like service-business wallpaper until one notices the service list. A liquor transfer does not behave like a developer site acquisition. A stock-transfer escrow is not a five-unit apartment sale. Standardization helps with routine work; Commerce Escrow placed its bet on the exceptions.
“We do not have a ‘cookie cutter’ approach.”Commerce Escrow, on custom transaction handling
In 1996, the founders added RPM Investments, a qualified intermediary for Section 1031 exchanges. The pairing is tidy. Commerce Escrow manages the closing mechanics; RPM handles the exchange structure in which an investor sells qualifying real property and acquires replacement property under tax-code deadlines. The important word is deadline. Miss the prescribed window and the intended tax deferral can disappear. Having the exchange officer and escrow officer working together reduces one of the least charming features of complex transactions: two specialist firms discovering too late that each assumed the other was watching the clock.
Why a bank paid for the waiting
In January 2015, Opus Bank agreed to buy Commerce Escrow and RPM for $25 million, paid 45 percent in cash and 55 percent in Opus shares. The final allocation put $15.8 million of consideration on Commerce Escrow and $9.2 million on RPM. Mark Minsky had explored a combination with Opus chief Stephen Gordon as early as 2005. A decade later, the match finally made sense.
The obvious attraction was fee income. The more interesting attraction was sitting in the escrow accounts. When the deal was announced, Commerce Escrow and RPM were facilitating transactions with more than $700 million in deposit balances. Those funds belonged to clients and would eventually leave. But while the transactions remained open, the bank had a recurring pool of deposits. The company served customers at the front desk and supplied funding at the back.
Pacific Premier Bank inherited the division when it acquired Opus in 2020. In 2021, Commerce Escrow generated $7.3 million in escrow and exchange fees and carried $903.8 million in low-cost deposits, about 5.3 percent of Pacific Premier’s total deposits. This is the little machine inside the larger one: experts move transactions through narrow passages; temporary balances give the parent bank another source of funding.
The figures also show what failed first when the cycle weakened: volume-linked economics. Annual escrow and exchange fees declined from $7.3 million in 2021 to $6.3 million in 2022, $4.0 million in 2023 and roughly $2.8 million in 2024. Deposits were $333.7 million at the end of 2023 and $378 million in March 2025. Commerce Escrow did not disclose a dramatic strategic reversal. The simpler lesson is that a business attached to property transactions rises and falls with the transactions. Expertise cushions cyclicality; it does not cancel it.
The business changed owners, not its accent
Commerce Escrow has now passed through three bank parents while keeping its specialist name. Opus bought it in 2015. Pacific Premier acquired Opus in 2020. Columbia Banking System completed its acquisition of Pacific Premier in August 2025, and the Commerce Escrow site now describes the operation as a division of Columbia Bank.
Graf and Minsky open Commerce Escrow in Los Angeles.
RPM Investments adds qualified-intermediary service for 1031 exchanges.
Opus buys the pair for $25 million and retains them as divisions.
Pacific Premier acquires Opus and keeps Commerce Escrow.
Columbia acquires Pacific Premier; a third bank parent arrives.
The continuity is revealing. A large institution could fold escrow into a general service menu, erase the old brand and route every inquiry through a call center. Instead, the current page still lists Robert Minsky as head of escrow and exchange, names individual officers, and repeats the old promise of tailored handling. Columbia adds adjacent services - commercial property financing and self-directed retirement accounts - but the escrow desk remains legible as its own craft.
What another specialist can borrow
The copyable part is not “start an escrow company.” It is the architecture. Choose work in which errors are expensive, exceptions recur and time matters. Put experienced operators where customers can reach them. Join adjacent steps that are painful to coordinate - here, a commercial closing and its 1031 exchange. Then notice the secondary asset produced by doing the primary job. For Commerce Escrow, customer money in transit became useful bank deposits.
There is also a restraint worth copying. The company does not pretend every transaction belongs in the same workflow. It assigns an officer supported by a wider team and calls on relationships with banks, lenders, title companies, brokers and messengers. The operating model accepts that the last mile may be human, local and annoyingly specific.
Commerce Escrow occupies an unfashionable but durable corner of finance. It is smaller than a title insurer, more specialized than a retail escrow desk and more human than an online marketplace. Its customers are not buying excitement. They are buying the absence of a particular kind of excitement - the phone call at 4:47 p.m. explaining why the money cannot move.