9 files a year of assignments and double closes. Is a TC even the right spend?

Running the numbers on whether to bring in a coordinator or build the process myself, and the file mix is what makes it awkward.

Last twelve months: 9 closings. 5 assignments, 2 double closes with transactional funding, 2 straight retail resales of finished flips. Average time from contract to close 26 days on the assignments, 41 on the flips. My state closes through attorneys, so title and settlement coordination is largely somebody else's desk already.

Quotes I've collected: $450 to $550 per file for investor work, and one coordinator wanted $650 for the double closes because there are two settlement statements and a funding lender with its own conditions. Call it $4,600 a year at the midpoint. Against that, my current cost is a spreadsheet, four saved email templates, and roughly three hours per file of my own admin, so about 27 hours annually.

So I'd be paying $170 an hour to buy back time I'm not sure is my constraint. My constraint is deal flow. The counterargument is that two of last year's assignments nearly died on paperwork I was slow on, one because I didn't get the assignment agreement to the closing attorney until day 4 and the end buyer got nervous.

Two things I can't resolve. Whether coordinators who mostly do agent files actually handle assignment and funding-lender paperwork competently, or whether I'd be training them on my own dime. And whether at 9 files the fixed overhead of onboarding a TC, building the process, teaching my sequence, eats the whole benefit before the year is out.

If I scale to 20 files the answer is obviously yes. At 9 I keep talking myself in and out of it.

Answer

2samantha_ruizAU4APRO6

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.

9 files a year of assignments and double closes. Is a TC even the right spend?

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