Whether nine files a year of assignments and double closes justifies a transaction coordinator

Take an investor closing nine files in a year: 5 assignments, 2 double closes with transactional funding, 2 straight retail resales of finished flips. Average time from contract to close runs 26 days on the assignments, 41 on the flips, and the state closes through attorneys, so title and settlement coordination is largely handled already. Market quotes for this kind of file run $450 to $550 per file for investor work, with double closes priced higher, often around $650, because there are two settlement statements and a funding lender with its own conditions. At the midpoint that lands around $4,600 a year. Against that, the alternative cost is a spreadsheet, a handful of saved email templates, and roughly three hours per file of personal admin, about 27 hours annually. That prices out to roughly $170 an hour to buy back time that may not be the actual constraint. Deal flow usually is the constraint at this volume, not paperwork. The counterargument is real too: assignment paperwork that arrives late at the closing attorney's desk, even by a few days, can make an end buyer nervous enough to walk, and that risk does not show up in an hourly rate. Two things worth resolving before hiring one. Whether a coordinator who mostly handles agent files can competently handle assignment and funding-lender paperwork, or whether the investor ends up training them on their own dime. And whether at nine files the fixed overhead of onboarding, building the process, and teaching the sequence eats the entire benefit before the year is out. At twenty files a year the case is obvious. At nine, it is a genuine coin flip, and worth watching what breaks first, deal flow or paperwork, before answering it.

aaron_fitz10 PU1APRO 13

Answer

samantha_ruizPassivePRO

Your 27 hours is wrong, and that's where the decision is hiding. Three hours per file is the time you'd log if you sat down and did it as a task. The real cost is that the admin arrives in 6 minute interruptions across 26 days while you're on a roof or on the phone with a seller, and it's the interruption that made you 4 days late with that assignment agreement, not the workload. Nobody is slow at a task that takes 40 minutes. People are slow at tasks they keep setting down.

So price it against the near-death files instead. Two of nine nearly died. If your assignment fee averages anything north of $8k, one saved deal covers two years of coordination.

On competence with assignments and transactional funding, most agent-side coordinators haven't touched either and will tell you they have. Ask each of them to walk you through, out loud, the document sequence on a double close where the funding lender needs the A-B settlement statement before it wires. If they can't do it cold, you're paying to train them. One of mine couldn't and I found out on a live file.

What I'd do at 9 files is hire per-file with no retainer, start on the two flip resales where the sequence is ordinary, and only move the assignments over once you've watched them work. That caps the training cost at two files instead of a year. The thing I'd still worry about is that on 9 files you never become a priority client for anybody, and priority is most of what you're buying.

samantha_ruizPassivePRO

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