You are given a text that consists of multiple sentences. Your task is to perform abstractive summarization on this text. Use your understanding of the content to express the main ideas and crucial details in a shorter, coherent, and natural sounding text. 
Text: Joining us today will be our Chief Executive Officer, Dennis Gilmore; and Mark Seaton, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer.
The year is off to a great start with our core businesses achieving strong financial results.
Our outlook remains optimistic based on market trends, and we are confident that 2021 will be another good year.
Today, I'll focus my remarks on the progress we are making on a number of key strategic initiatives as well as our venture investment program.
Mark will then provide details on the first quarter results.
A transformation is well under way in the real estate sector, as paper intensive processes convert to digital.
First American is investing the time, expertise and capital to continue to lead the change within the title and settlement industry.
We continue to make significant investments in technology across all of our major businesses to enhance the customer experience through digital solutions.
Many of these efforts are now finding success in the marketplace.
In our commercial business, we've launched ClarityFirst, a platform that enables a streamlined closing process and provides greater transparency and efficiency relative to conventional methods.
We believe this is the first end-to-end digital solution for commercial real estate transactions.
Since the nationwide rollout in June, we have facilitated over 60,000 commercial transactions.
Endpoint is another example of First America's commitment to innovation.
A digital start-up that we've launched in Seattle in 2019 to reimagine the closing experience has captured a 2% market share in that area.
Encouraged by our success, we've recently entered six new markets, and we plan on growing to 20 markets by the end of the year.
In addition to providing a digital consumer experience, Endpoint is redesigning the closing process, and we anticipate significant productivity gains versus today's traditional settlement transactions.
Not only are we deploying new digital tools to reimagine the customer experience, we are accelerating our investment in data, we need to enhance our long-term competitive position.
Our data business has grown steadily over the last ten years.
Years ago, we set out to create a world-class property data company.
Today, we have the industry's most comprehensive and accurate property data, including title plant information.
In 2020, our data business exceeded $100 million of pre-tax earnings, a significant milestone.
A number of years ago, we set out to automate the manual data entry process.
We currently hold 11 patents covering OCR and data extraction, which has facilitated us to caption over 60% of our data in a fully automated manner.
We expect this percentage to continue to grow in the future.
This technology has allowed us to vastly increase the amount of data we capture.
We are currently capturing virtually every data point on 5 million documents per month.
Today, we have 500 title plants, which is the largest data repository in the industry to support title underwriting decisions.
Because of our patent extraction process, we have started the journey to add an additional 1,000 title plants on a go-forward basis.
In short, we are leading the effort when it comes to property data.
One benefit of having a strong data foundation is that it feeds automation of our title production.
Today, 96% of our Company's refinance transactions run through our automated underwriting engine.
Based on our own risk profile, we've achieved a fully automated underwriting decision on 50% of those orders, and we are semi-automated on additional 40%.
Given the success we've had with refinance automation, we have turned our attention to the purchase transactions.
All of these initiatives, whether related to closing data or title production, will improve the experience of our customers and our own productivity, which is why we have dedicated the necessary talent, capital and focus to lead the title and settlement industry in the digital era.
Turning to our venture strategy.
Since 2019, we've invested $225 million in venture-backed companies in the proptech ecosystem.
These investments give us insight into the high growth technology companies, and most of which have become strategic partners.
Not only have these investments added value from a strategic perspective, but they are providing financial upside as well, and Mark will elaborate further in his comments.
Venture investments have continued to be a component of our capital allocation strategy.
We believe the strategic and financial value of these investments to our shareholders will be attractive over the long term.
Additionally, I'm pleased to announce that we were recently named a Fortune 100 Best Company to Work For, for the sixth consecutive year.
Amid the challenges of 2020, we never lost sight of the fact that our employees are the key to our Company's success.
In closing, I'm very confident that 2021 will be another great year for First American.
We're pleased to report excellent results this quarter.
We earned $2.10 per diluted share.
Included in this quarter's results were $0.46 of net realized investment gains.
Excluding these gains, we earned $1.64 per diluted share.
I'll start with our title business.
Revenue in our Title segment was $1.9 billion, up 45% compared with the same quarter of 2020.
All three of our major markets; Purchase, Refinance and Commercial, were favorable this quarter.
Purchase revenue was up 27%, driven by a 15% increase in the number of closed orders, coupled with an 11% increase in the average revenue per order.
Refinance revenue climbed at 79% relative to last year and was flat relative to the fourth quarter, as refinance closings continued to be elevated as a result of low mortgage rates.
Notably, Commercial showed its first year-over-year revenue increase since the pandemic.
Commercial revenue was $163 million, a 2% increase over last year.
A number of large transactions closed at the end of the quarter, signaling the overall strength in the commercial environment.
On the agency side, revenue was a record $845 million, up 41% from last year.
Given the reporting lag in agent revenues of approximately one quarter, we are experiencing a surge in remittances related to Q4 economic activity.
Our information and other revenues were $275 million, up 32% relative to last year.
This line item represents revenue from a collection of business lines that are not premium or escrow related and therefore, not risk-based.
The largest component of information and other is revenue from our data and analytics business, which totaled $89 million, a 17% increase from last year.
Investment income within the Title Insurance and Services segment was $43 million, down 29%, primarily due to the impact of the decline in short-term interest rates on the investment portfolio and cash balances, partially offset by higher interest income from the Company's warehouse lending business.
In our Title segment, pre-tax margin was 17.1%.
Excluding the impact of net realized investment gains, pre-tax margin was 14.1%, a record for the first quarter.
I'll note that we've lowered the loss rate 100 basis points to 4% this quarter.
This brings our loss rate in line with where we booked prior to the pandemic.
By booking at 5% in 2020, we added $52 million to our IBNR.
Given relatively low claims activity, significant levels of home equity, rising home prices and a strengthening economy, we elected to lower the loss rate this quarter.
Turning to the Specialty Insurance segment.
Pretax earnings totaled $6 million, down from $13 million in 2020.
Our home warranty business, which accounts for 75% of the revenue for the segment, continued to see growth in the top line.
Revenue was up 11% over last year.
Importantly, revenue in our direct-to-consumer channel increased 18%.
We continue to see elevated claims largely as a result of people spending more time at home.
Our property and casualty business posted a loss of $7 million this quarter.
The wind down of our property and casualty business is progressing on schedule with policies beginning to non-renewal in May.
Based on our current plan, we expect at least 50% reduction in our policies in-force by the end of the year.
The effective tax rate for the quarter was 23.4%, in line with our normalized tax rate of 23% to 24%.
With respect to the information security incident, the SEC and New York Department of Financial Services matters remain ongoing.
We continue to believe that they, along with all other matters relating to the incident, will be immaterial from a financial perspective.
Turning to capital management, we repurchased $65 million of stock at an average price of $52.86 during the quarter.
Since March of 2020, we've repurchased $203 million of stock, which is close to the amount of our annual dividend to stockholders.
We have not repurchased shares thus far in the second quarter.
However, as we referenced on our last earnings call, we intend to be more active with share repurchases in the future.
As Dennis mentioned in his remarks, we've invested a total of $225 million in venture-backed companies.
Our largest investment was in OfferPad, an iBuyer that is now party to a merger with Supernova Partners Acquisition Company, who last month announced that the value of the aggregate equity consideration to be paid to OfferPad's stockholders and option holders will be equal to $2.25 billion.
If the transaction is consummated at that valuation, we would expect to book a gain later this year of approximately $237 million on our $85 million investment.
Additionally, this quarter, we recorded $42 million of gains related to other venture investments, including in Side [Phonetic] a real estate SaaS company that serves high-performing agents, teams and brokers.
We remain optimistic about our 2021 outlook.
Although refinance orders have declined, corresponding to an increase in mortgage rates, the purchase and commercial markets continue to grow.
Our claims experience is favorable and the general improvement in the economy to tail into our business.

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q1 earnings per share $2.10.
q1 revenue rose 43 percent to $2.0 billion.

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