Missed an inspection deadline by one day. Do I hire a TC or just build a better checklist?

The part a checklist doesn't do is chase other people. Your deadline didn't slip because you didn't know the date. It slipped because you were mid turnover and the calendar alert went off on a phone you were ignoring. A coordinator calls you Friday, then calls again Saturday morning, then texts the agent so there's a paper trail either way. That's the product. Whether it's worth $425 to you depends on how often your attention gets pulled somewhere else during a live contract, and by your own account that's the failure mode.

Five deals a year is on the small side for a dedicated TC but plenty of independents take that. They'd rather have ten clients doing five than one client doing fifty, because the fifty-deal client can leave and take the whole business. Ask about a minimum monthly retainer though, some of them will want one and that changes your math a lot.

Your $2,125 versus $3,400 comparison is doing something sneaky. You're pricing the TC against a mistake that already happened, which means you're implicitly saying the mistake recurs annually. Does it? If you blow one deadline every four years the expected annual cost is $850 and the TC loses on those numbers. If the sewer line thing is a symptom and you're actually clipping a few hundred dollars of value off most files by being late or sloppy, the TC wins easily. You'd need to look back at your last five closings honestly and count what slipped.

@sable that's fair but it undercounts the deal you don't do. Thicket said he was mid turnover. The real cost of self-coordinating at volume is that the admin load caps how many contracts you're willing to have open at once. If having a TC means he'll take a sixth deal he'd otherwise pass on, that dwarfs $3,400.

What does the $425 actually cover? That's the first thing I'd pin down before comparing anything. I've seen quotes at that number that mean "I open the file, order title, and send a weekly summary email" and quotes at that number that mean the coordinator is on the phone with the lender's processor twice a week. Get the scope document. If they can't produce one, that tells you what you need to know.

Sewer line at $3,400 is cheap, by the way. You got lucky the seller only owed you that much.

New to this so mostly asking, but if the attorney is already handling the closing documents in his state, what's left for a coordinator to do? I thought that was the job.

@wren the attorney handles the closing. The coordinator handles everything between signing the contract and the day the attorney takes over, which is where the deadlines live. Inspection window, due diligence period, earnest money delivery, financing contingency, appraisal, insurance binder, whatever the contract says. The attorney isn't tracking whether your repair request went out on time. He shows up at the end. This split works differently in states where a title company runs closings instead of an attorney, so it's worth knowing which one you're in.

Running a service business, the thing I'd flag from the other side of the desk: a coordinator working for a buyer with no agent on the file is a different job than one working under an agent. There's no broker file to keep compliant, no commission paperwork, no brokerage checklist. Some TCs are built entirely around brokerage compliance and will be lost on a direct investor purchase. Ask what percentage of their current book is investor buyers. If it's zero, you'll be training them, and you'll be paying $425 for the privilege.

The deadline that bit you probably had a specific mechanism in the contract, and I'd read that language before deciding anything. Most inspection provisions I've read make the buyer's objection a strict deadline where silence counts as acceptance, which is why the seller could just say no. Some contracts instead require written notice to terminate and are softer on the repair request. Knowing which one your standard form uses tells you which deadlines actually carry teeth and which just look scary on a checklist. A coordinator worth hiring will know that for your state's form. If yours doesn't, you've learned something for $0.

Going through licensing right now and one thing came up that's relevant. What a non-licensed coordinator is allowed to do varies by state, and a few states get twitchy about unlicensed people doing things that look like negotiating or advising on contract terms. So the TC telling you "the deadline is Sunday" is fine everywhere I've read about, and the TC telling you "you should ask for $3,400" might not be. Worth confirming with your state commission rather than assuming.

We run a small team and moved coordination in house at about 30 files a year, which is where the math flipped for us. Below that, paying per file was cheaper than a part time person and much cheaper than the management overhead. At 5 deals you're nowhere near that line, so the only question is per-file TC versus you. One thing nobody's said: the software alone does a chunk of this. A transaction management platform with date rules built off contract execution will generate the whole deadline chain automatically and email everyone. That's maybe $40 to $70 a month depending on what you pick. Try that for two deals before you hire a human. If you still miss dates with automated reminders, the problem is that you need a person who will nag you, and then hire one.

@cobalt this is what I'd do first. The software costs less than one file's coordination fee for a full year.

Counterpoint to the software answer, and I say this as someone who buys tools instead of making decisions. Thicket already had a calendar. He had the date. Adding a second system that shows him the same date he already had doesn't fix anything. The failure was that nothing escalated when he didn't act. Software can escalate too but only if he configures it to, and configuring escalation is exactly the kind of task a person avoids when they're busy with turnovers. A human coordinator escalates by default because that's what they're being paid for.

Try one file. Pay the $425 on your next contract, watch what she does, and decide after. You'll learn more from one file than from this whole thread.

One thing to ask a candidate: what happens on your file when they take a vacation or get sick. Solo coordinators are a single point of failure, and the whole reason you're hiring is to remove your own single point of failure. Some of them have a backup arrangement with another coordinator, most don't. If a deadline lands in their off week, you're back to your spreadsheet and you didn't know it.

@thicket the number I'd actually want from you is how many hours a week the coordination is eating now. You gave us the $3,400 because it's the memorable loss, but at 5 deals a year with a 30 to 45 day contract period you're probably live on a file five or six months out of twelve. If that's three hours a week during those months, that's roughly 70 hours a year at $2,125, so around $30 an hour for your time back. Whether that's a good trade depends on what you do with the hours, and if the answer is more tenant turnovers, you might just be moving the bottleneck.