Hired a TC at $395 for six acquisitions, tracked what it actually bought me

14 hours to 3.5 is the number I keep rereading. My first rental hasn't even closed yet and I've already lost a weekend to documents. Was the 14 hours mostly waiting on other people or mostly you doing something?

The 10.5 hours you got back per file is the whole case for the service, and it only converts to money if the recovered hours go somewhere that produces revenue. Yours did, you underwrote more and two purchases came from the extra volume. Someone who buys twice a year and recovers 21 hours has bought 21 hours of free time, which is a fine thing to buy, just a different purchase.

One thing to watch in your own numbers. You attribute two of six purchases to the added underwriting volume. That attribution is the assumption carrying the entire return calculation, and it's not testable from inside a single fourteen month run. If those two deals would have surfaced anyway through the same channels, the coordinator bought you time and not deals, and $2,370 against 63 recovered hours is still about $37 an hour of your time, which is likely fine.

On the seller-financed file, the scoping you did is the right sequence. What a non-attorney, non-licensee may prepare or advise on differs by state, and several states treat preparation of notes and security instruments as the practice of law, so the coordinator declining that work and routing it to an attorney is the normal arrangement rather than a limitation. Confirm the specific boundary with an attorney licensed where the property sits before you assume the same scope travels to your next state.

The Friday summary in a fixed format is the underrated item on your list. Fixed format means you read it in ninety seconds and notice the blank field. Free-form status emails hide blanks.

Buy side only is the right call and people skip past it. Sell side coordination on a long hold is a different set of documents and a different rhythm, and mixing them in one flat fee is how coordinators end up underwater.

$395 buy side, paid at close, six files in fourteen months. From her side that's $2,370 of revenue from a client who produces roughly one file every ten weeks. That's a fine client but she needs eight of you. Worth knowing, because the day she gets a team account doing twelve files a month, your Friday email gets shorter.

What does the scope document say about who holds the deadline when she sends a reminder and you don't act? That's the clause I'd want to see quoted, because "weekly summary" and "deadline responsibility" can sit in the same agreement without touching each other.

Reading this while studying for the license exam and the seller-financed file is the interesting one. She said she'd never done one and told you so before taking it. I'd have been too embarrassed to say that and I'd have learned on your money.

@warrant we write it as: coordinator tracks and notifies, principal decides and acts, and a missed date after two documented notifications is on the principal. Clients sometimes push back on that and I've never once removed it.

@windlass, on the Friday format, do you have her include the items she's still waiting on from third parties separately from items she's waiting on from you? That split is what makes the email actionable in ninety seconds instead of five minutes.

I'm two years from buying anything and I've been reading this room to work out what the real work of a closing is. The answer seems to be that it's twenty small chases and any one of them can cost you real money. That's more useful to me than most of what I've read about deal analysis.