Taking a construction loan file adds about four hours to coordination and most flat fees do not reflect that

The draw inspection is a lender-controlled event sitting inside a coordinator's deliverable, and that asymmetry is the whole pricing problem.

Say a coordinator takes a construction file at $375 flat. If the bank-side inspector delays a draw by five days and that slips the closing, the coordinator absorbs the extra tracking time and the client conversation at zero additional rate. On a file that already ran four hours over a standard file, the effective rate on those four hours might be $18 to $22 per hour depending on how the rest of the file went. That is not a math problem, it is a contract problem, because the agreement almost certainly does not distinguish between a contingency date the coordinator can calendar and a draw inspection the coordinator can only watch.

Separate pricing wins on anything where a third party controls a material deadline and that party has no obligation to the coordinator at all. Averaged pricing works when file types are genuinely similar in risk profile, and construction versus standard purchase are not. The draw schedule is not just extra steps, it is a sequence where one missed window can require a re-inspection, a re-approval, and a revised closing date, none of which the coordinator triggered.

The clause worth adding is not a construction surcharge line item but a scope definition: the agreement should specify that any file with a lender-controlled draw schedule is priced at X, and that each draw cycle beyond the number stated in the original schedule at signing carries an additional fee. That converts an open-ended risk into a defined unit of work.

What does your current agreement say happens to your fee if the closing date changes because of something outside your control?

The clause that actually matters in your agreement is probably the one defining what a "file" is, and most agreements I have seen define it by transaction type rather than by the number of moving parts. A construction loan fits inside "purchase transaction" and that is where the fee gets capped. Take a file priced at $350 flat where the construction draw process adds four hours at a coordinator's effective rate of $65 an hour. That is $260 in uncompensated time on a single file. If a coordinator handles fifteen files a month and three of them are construction, the monthly gap is $780, which is not catastrophic until the draw schedule on two of those three files slips by a week each, adding another hour apiece, and suddenly the math on averaged pricing requires the remaining twelve files to carry a cost they were never priced to carry.

The specific language worth adding to a construction file addendum is a third-party delay carve-out: something to the effect that any deadline controlled solely by the lender's designated inspector resets the coordinator's performance obligations by the same number of business days, and that coordinator hours logged beyond the base scope on draw-related tracking bill at an agreed overage rate. Without that clause, the coordinator absorbs every slip. The question I would put back is whether your current agreement defines "completion" as close of escrow or as final disbursement of funds, because on a construction loan those two dates can be weeks apart, and if you are committed through final disbursement at a flat fee, the calculus changes considerably.

The effective hourly math is the place most coordinators look last. Take a flat fee of $350 and assume a standard file takes seven hours, so $50 an hour. Add four hours for construction and that rate drops to $31.50. Add one draw inspection rescheduled by the bank's inspector and you're probably at twelve hours total, so $29 an hour, which is below what most coordinators charge for anything.

The averaging approach works until the construction files cluster, and they do cluster because they follow the same builders and the same lenders in a given market. Two or three slipped draw schedules in the same quarter and the averaged fee stops making sense even on paper.

The separate line item also does something the averaged rate cannot: it creates a written record that the coordinator flagged the lender-side timeline risk before the file opened, which matters if a missed inspection date becomes a dispute later. Most standard TC agreements I've seen are silent on who owns the tracking obligation when a third-party controls the triggering event. That silence is the actual exposure.

What does your agreement currently say about liability when a deadline is controlled by a party you have no contract with?

Four hours low in my experience watching this from the agent side. The draw inspector rescheduling once can eat that entire buffer before lunch.

What I want to know before I'd sign any TC agreement on a construction file is whether the coordinator's liability clause distinguishes between a deadline they control and one the bank's inspector controls, because if it doesn't, you're sharing blame for a miss that was never yours to prevent.