What I Learned from Closing 1,000 Real Estate Transactions as a Transaction Coordinator
In 2023, I hit a personal milestone I had been aiming at for a while, closing my 1,000th deal as a real estate transaction coordinator. After celebrating, I took some time to reflect on what I learned. While there were a million little things I learned along the way, five key themes stuck out to me on how to succeed in this role. Watch the video above or keep reading to see what I learned.
Number ONE - Proactivity is key. Yes, the VERY first and most important thing I thought of when reflecting on what I’ve learned over 3 years and 1,000 transactions was to BE PROACTIVE. There are a couple of key parts of this. I don’t just mean working ahead on your transaction tasks. What this means more often than not, is looking ahead at the transaction as a whole and anticipating any future hiccups or issues we can get a head start on. Do we think we might move up the closing? Let me go ahead and submit compliance a few days early then. Seller in another state? Let me go ahead and email everyone now so they are aware. Catch my drift? The second part of proactivity in this role is being proactive to avoid being REACTIVE. I get an insane amount of emails, texts, calls, and more a day. If I am not staying on top of my most important items, it can be easy to get lost in the sea of notifications. Time blocking is big here. I need to be thinking ahead of what is most important in the transaction to get done. I cringe if any agent reaches out and asks me about something I haven’t done yet - I always want to be one step ahead.
Number two - COMMUNICATION. Most transaction coordinators advertise themselves as liaisons to the transaction. What do liaisons do? Communicate. In real estate, no news is rarely ever good news, so it is imperative to keep communication lines open between all parties. Having an issue getting a response? I’ve got some videos on that. It is especially important to find a good communication plan with your clients. I’ve seen too many TCs fail because they didn’t get a response from the agent so the task was just never taken care of. Don’t be that TC. Communicate, communicate again, then communicate some more. No one ever was chastised for overcommunicating. Lack of communication is one of the biggest gripes we hear from agents who come to us from other TCs before.
Number three - Be flexible. To me, this is where you can make yourself stand out as a transaction coordinator. While we all have our checklists and order of things, this is real estate people! No deal or day is ever the same. Being adaptable and flexible in how you do your business will provide a better customer experience for your agents and their clients. Have an urgent last-minute deal where we need to get everything done in one day? Not ideal - but being flexible here will earn you gratitude and respect from your clients. It is important to have standards in our businesses, but it is also important that our business structures have flexibility when working in such a dynamic industry. Also, be flexible in your service offerings. Every agent and brokerage works a little differently and having some flexibility in our checklists makes it easier to work with a wider network of clients. Lastly, this industry is ever-changing. Stay in tune with industry changes and trends and be ready to adapt to keep your TC business standing out from the crowd.
Number four - Prioritize. Prioritize. Prioritize. Honestly, I thought about moving this to number one. If I could give one piece of advice to a brand-new TC, it would be to learn how to prioritize and learn it fast. You probably tell agents that you don’t let things slip through the cracks, right? The only way to do that is to prioritize effectively. You must know what the most important tasks are and take care of them first thing every day. I recommend having a system that allows you to color code or flag tasks as high priority so they are easily distinguishable and you prioritize them accordingly. I also recommend having it be part of your process to check back on any of these items that might not have been resolved one more time at the end of the day. Newer TCs can get stuck in the bad habit of not prioritizing because when you only have a few files going, it is easy to knock out EVERYTHING before lunch. So it doesn’t really matter if an important item was at the bottom of your list for the day, it is still getting done. Once you start to have 20, 30, 50, or 80+ files going at one time, it is physically impossible to get everything done, every day, that is why prioritizing is critical. Take this from me, when my file count jumped I had to learn this while drowning in 100+ tasks to do a day. Put prioritizing into practice now if you aren’t already. Some easy things to prioritize? Any contractual deadlines, upcoming closings and anything urgently requested by the agent, client, or another party to the transaction.
Number five - You’ll never regret doing the right thing or going the extra mile. I think this is a great one to end on. As transaction coordinators, we are in somewhat of a unique position as in most cases, the agent still has the final say and control of everything in the transaction and we are there to assist them. However, we may become privy to information or notice something is off, and while maybe everything would be fine if we don’t say anything “since it isn’t ultimately up to us and the agent should have noticed” - I’ve learned it never hurts to do the right thing. Does something look weird to you on a document? Did someone make a comment that has you concerned? Did the agent send an amendment that wasn’t returned so should we just assume it wasn’t agreed upon? In all of these cases and more, I’ve found it is always worth it to bring it to your agent’s attention. It might be nothing, but it might be something, and as their partner in their transactions, you can do the right thing by providing them with all of the information so they can make decisions or escalate an issue, even if it might not be pretty. And lastly, sometimes our clients or their buyers and sellers need our help. Now, we don’t need to be adding unlimited services and working for free - but if a particular transaction or situation requires us to go the extra mile, I’ve also always found this to be worth it. It establishes loyalty and respect if you do it when it is truly needed. At the end of the day, we are service providers, we want to provide the best customer service possible.
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