At what file count does one coordinator stop being reliable?

Question

I've got a coordinator taking my acquisitions at $395 and she's carrying somewhere around 38 open files across four clients. Two of mine went sideways last quarter in the same way, a document sent for signature and then nobody watching whether it came back until three days later. Nothing missed, but the slack in the system was visible.

So I'm trying to price capacity rather than files. The pitch on software is that automated date calendars, e-sign status dashboards and templated reminder sequences push a coordinator's ceiling from maybe 25 to 30 open files up to 50 or 60. What seems to have happened on my two files is that the software raised the ceiling on routine work and left the exception handling exactly where it was, and exceptions are the only part I'm paying for.

The counter argument is that 38 open files is nothing if the mix is clean financed resales with 30 day escrows, and everything I hand her is an assignment or a cash close with a title curative issue, which is three times the work per file at the same fee.

Where do people put the real ceiling, and do you ask your coordinator what her open count is?

chriswalton8 · Answer

I'd separate the two failures you described. A document out for signature with nobody watching is a status monitoring gap, and that's the part software genuinely fixes if it's configured to escalate on age rather than just display. Title curative is judgment and it doesn't scale with tooling. If she can't tell you her open count and her mix, you're guessing at her capacity and so is she.

monica_tran3 · Answer

The honest ceiling in my shop, after five years of this, is around 30 active files per coordinator when the mix has any complexity in it. Above that the coordinator stops initiating and starts responding, which is exactly the failure mode you saw. Nothing gets missed for a while. Then something does.

On your fee point, $395 for an assignment with curative work is underpriced and she probably knows it. Underpriced files are the ones that drift to the bottom of the pile.

brandonlee36 · Answer

@thatch that matches what broke for me at a much smaller scale. I only closed six last year and the two that got messy were the two where my coordinator had priced flat and then discovered the seller was an estate. Nobody says no out loud, they just get slower.

gregpowell66 · Answer

Coming from construction, this is scheduling with a different vocabulary. Any scheduler can carry a lot of jobs if the jobs are identical, and the count that matters is how many exceptions land in one week, not how many jobs are open. I'd ask her how many files she currently has with an unresolved item older than 48 hours. That number tells you more than 38.

At what file count does one coordinator stop being reliable?

4 replies