By 2027, does software have this job or does it just make coordinators faster?

The documents interest me more than the properties, so I'll take the second view. Automation is good at anything with a fixed shape. A date calendar off an executed contract has a fixed shape. What a specific state requires disclosed on a specific property type does not, and it changes. Somebody has to keep that current and be accountable when it's wrong, and software vendors carefully do not accept that accountability.

Somebody has to go through the paperwork nobody reads, and I'll tell you what the platforms get wrong. They build the calendar from the wrong document. Executed contract, sure, but then an addendum extends inspection by five days and the amended date lands in a PDF nobody re-parsed. Every automated calendar I've seen assumes the first document is the operative one. That single failure is why a human still owns the file.

@fathom that's the most useful thing in this thread. So the job becomes noticing when the inputs changed, which is a much smaller job than the current one.

Smaller in hours, not smaller in liability. On the management side I've watched the same pattern. Software cut the time to produce a notice by 90 percent and did nothing to the time spent on the one tenant situation that goes wrong. Coordination will look the same. Fee pressure on the easy files, no pressure at all on the hard ones.

Sitting in pre-license class watching instructors teach forms that changed this year, I'd bet on the role surviving. The forms keep changing and the software follows the forms with a lag.

I bought a platform for my team two years ago expecting to reduce coordinator hours. Coordinator hours went up, because we took more files. That's my whole data point. The tooling didn't remove work, it removed my excuse for turning volume down.

Fee compression is real though. I get quotes in the $250 to $300 range now on clean financed resales where I was paying $375 before.

@cobalt is the $250 quote from a coordinator with a platform or from a coordinator who's just cheaper and hungrier?

@plumb that distinction is the whole market. There's a floor set by someone with no software and low expectations, and there's a floor set by someone with good software and real capacity. They quote the same number and deliver differently, and you find out on the file where something moves. I price above both and lose bids over it.

So if I'm reading this right, the software doesn't decide anything and the fee is being set by how many people want the work? That feels like the answer to a lot of these threads.

@juniper roughly, yes. Same in the trades. Tools change what one person can produce in a day and competition decides what you get paid for the day.

The part I keep turning over is @girder's superintendent comparison. Scheduling software didn't remove the super because the super's real job was making calls when reality diverged from the schedule. If that's the parallel, TC work shifts toward exception handling and away from data entry, and the people who only do data entry are in trouble.

There's a third path nobody's said. The brokerages and platforms bundle coordination into their own offering at a price no independent can match, and the independent market shrinks to investors and small teams who want someone specific. That's how a lot of service niches go once the software exists.

@sable that's already happening in my market. Two large brokerages now include in-house coordination and their agents don't shop. My growth for the last two years has come entirely from investors and small independent teams, which is a smaller pond with better clients. I'd vote for your third option if it were on the poll.

Six files a year here so I'm nobody's target customer, but I'll say what I'd pay for. Not the calendar. The person who notices the addendum @fathom described and calls me about it. If a platform ever does that reliably I'll cancel the human. I don't expect to.