Coordinating other people's double closes. Which part of this is my liability?

Your engagement letter is the whole answer to your last paragraph, and one page written for ordinary resales won't do it. What I'd want in there: a plain statement that you don't hold funds and don't direct disbursement, that the closing agent controls sequence and timing, that you're relaying documents rather than approving them, and a limitation of liability tied to the fee. Have an attorney in your state draft it, because limitation clauses get read differently in different jurisdictions.

The other thing is a paper trail on instructions. Every time you pass the funder's disbursement instructions to the closing agent, do it by email with the document attached and the agent confirming receipt. If a deal blows up, the argument is going to be about who told whom what and when, and the person with timestamps wins.

850 for two files, two title orders and babysitting a funder's docs sounds cheap from the outside. What's the actual hour count on a double versus a plain resale?

The sentence I'd read very carefully in each funder's instructions is the one about when their money is deemed released. Good funds rules differ by state, and in some places a wire that has arrived is not yet available for disbursement, which is exactly how a same day sequence slips into the next morning. If you're the one telling the client "we're funding at 2" you want to know whether the closing agent means received or collected.

Also ask each closing agent you work with whether they issue one policy or two, and who pays for the second. I've seen that argued over at the table more than once and it belongs in the file three weeks earlier.

@thatch how do the wholesalers react when you quote 850? I'm trying to understand whether the service side of this business can price on value or whether everyone shops on fee.

Run the numbers on the 850 before you defend it. If a double takes you nine hours against four for a resale, you're earning 94 an hour on the double and 137 on the plain file, so you've priced your harder work worse. And the doubles carry the tail risk that @warrant is describing, which the resales don't.

I'd be at 1,200 with the engagement letter rewritten. If you lose a third of those clients you're not worse off, and the ones who stay are the ones who understood why the first number was wrong. @beacon they shop on fee until a deal dies at the table, then they shop on competence for about six months.