Priced 14 files at $300 flat. Effective rate came out under $22 an hour.

I ran the experiment I'd been talking about for months. Two agents, one small investor, 14 files over about five months, flat $300 per file, paid at close. Nine closed, three fell apart after inspection, two are still open.

I tracked time in six minute increments because I wanted a real number, not a feeling. Median file was 9.4 hours. Mean was 13.1, dragged up by two files that ate 28 and 31 hours. Both of those were the investor's, both were assignments with a lot of party confusion about who signs what, and both closed.

On the nine closed files I collected $2,700. Total tracked hours across all 14, including the three dead ones I got nothing for, was 183. That's $14.75 an hour if you count everything, about $21.90 if you only count the hours on the closed files. Software and e-sign ran me roughly $95 a month, so knock some more off.

The part I got wrong wasn't the rate exactly. I priced a file as if a file were one thing. A straightforward financed resale with a cooperative agent is a five hour file. An assignment where the end buyer's lender wants documents that don't exist yet is a thirty hour file. Same $300.

Second thing: paid at close means the failed files are unpaid labor, and the failed files aren't cheap. My three dead files averaged 7 hours before they died, mostly front-loaded intake and disclosure work.

What I'd change: tiered pricing by file type, an intake fee that isn't contingent on closing, and a written scope for what counts as one file when there are two closings stacked on one property. I'd also stop taking a file type I've never seen at a price I set for a file type I have.

Answer

1nicole_adeyemiPassivePRO5

Your two 30 hour files are the whole post and I'd go further than tiering.

The mean and median gap tells you your time distribution has a long tail, and flat pricing only works when the tail is short. You have three real options. Price the tail out by refusing those file types. Price the tail in by raising the flat fee to something like $475 so the easy files subsidize the hard ones, which means your two easy agents are paying for your one hard investor and one of them will eventually notice and shop. Or unbundle: flat fee covers a defined single closing with a named set of documents, and anything beyond that bills hourly at a stated rate with your written approval before you start the clock.

The third is the one that survives contact with reality, because it puts the pricing decision on the client at the moment the file turns weird instead of on you five months later in a spreadsheet.

On the non-contingent intake fee, yes, and make it small enough that nobody argues. $75 at file open, credited against the close fee. Your dead files then cost you 7 hours minus $75 instead of 7 hours minus nothing, and more importantly the client has committed something, which changes how they treat your document requests.

One caution on the assignment files. What a coordinator can do without a license varies by state, and assignment paperwork sits closer to the line than a plain resale in some of them. Worth getting that answered by someone licensed in your state before you build a tier around that file type and market it.

Priced 14 files at $300 flat. Effective rate came out under $22 an hour.

1 reply