First TC file, $450 fee, and a $2,500 re-trade over one email I never sent

$2,500 for one email is cheap tuition honestly. I've paid more than that for a permit I forgot to pull.

I want to push on the framing. You describe this as your missing email, and it is, but she took a $450 fee and produced a date calendar with a hole in it and never said anything about the hole. A coordinator who receives a purchase contract with a financing contingency in it and no lender contact should send you one line saying "I don't have a lender, your financing date is day 21, who do I call." That's not extra work, that's reading the contract she was hired to read. Split the blame however you like, but don't take all of it.

@ledger is right about the read-the-contract part. I ask every coordinator I interview one question: what do you do when the intake is incomplete. If the answer is anything other than "I chase you until it isn't," I keep looking. The good ones are annoying on purpose in week one.

Dumb question that I would not ask out loud: is the financing contingency date something the TC enforces, or is it just a date on a calendar and the enforcement is the seller deciding to be annoyed about it?

@compass I had to learn this too. Nobody enforces it automatically. It's a date after which the seller can start taking positions they couldn't take before. Which is exactly what happened to kestrel.

So the extension itself was free and the price was the credit? I'd have thought there'd be a per diem or something.

@vellum depends entirely on the contract form and the state, and some forms have per diem language built in and some don't. On our files the extension is usually negotiated, not priced.

kestrel, the fix you landed on is the right one. On my team the intake is a short form and the file doesn't get accepted until every field is filled. Not because we're strict for fun. An accepted file with a blank lender field turns into exactly your story about a third of the time.

I keep wondering if coordinating is a job I'd be good at. The real skill on display has little to do with paperwork. It's being willing to keep asking a paying client for something he hasn't sent.

@plumb yes, and that's the part that scares people off. You're a vendor chasing the person who pays you. I write it into the engagement now: I will contact you up to three times per outstanding item and then I escalate in writing that the item is outstanding and the date is unprotected. Puts it on paper.

The single biggest source of losses in the five years I've run a service business is an incomplete intake that somebody accepted anyway because they wanted the revenue. Every time. You can build the whole process correctly and still lose money at the door.

Land deals have the same shape, just slower. My contingency periods run 90 to 120 days and I still managed to let a survey deliverable slide because nobody's calendar owned it.

kestrel, out of curiosity, did her agreement say what she was responsible for calendaring, or was it generic? I've read a few TC agreements now and the scope language ranges from four bullet points to four pages.

In my pre-license class they spend maybe ten minutes on contract dates and none on who tracks them. The whole role exists in the gap that leaves.

The pattern is identical on the management end when we take over a property. The handoff packet either has the vendor contacts or it doesn't, and if it doesn't, something breaks in month two. Intake quality is the whole game.

Two things can be true. You dropped the email and she should have caught it. Everyone in this thread arguing about which one is the real cause is doing the thing where you look for a single root cause and there were two.

@solder that's the useful point. Systems that fail on one missing input are badly designed. The 24 hour calendar callback kestrel added is a second check on the first input, which is the actual fix.

I'm still in analysis on my first purchase and this is the kind of thing I was afraid of. Not the big scary risk, the $2,500 paper cut. Saving the intake list.

Can I ask what a date calendar actually looks like? Is it a spreadsheet she emails, or something in software?

@juniper mine came as a PDF from transaction management software with every date and who owns it. Took me ninety seconds to read and I should have read it on day one.

Building my buy list now and I've been assuming I'd self-coordinate the first few files to learn the sequence. This thread hasn't changed my mind, but it did make me write down that the sequence I need to learn includes the lender track, which I'd basically ignored.

@bramble self-coordinating your first two is defensible if you accept that you'll be slower and you'll find your own kestrel moment. Just don't self-coordinate while also running your first renovation.

The clause I'd want in that agreement is a definition of when the engagement is considered active. Hers said active on receipt of three things and she behaved as if it was active on receipt of one. If the trigger conditions aren't met the coordinator should say the file is not open yet, in writing. That single sentence changes who's holding the date.

kestrel, the thing I'd add after a few dozen files: read the calendar out loud against the contract once, yourself, in the first week. Takes ten minutes and it's the only time you'll ever have full context on the file. After that you're on to the next deal and you're trusting the process, which is fine, but the process needs one human check at the start.