Took 11 overflow files from a team mid-transition and got all 11 closed

A small team lost their in-house coordinator with two weeks' notice in the middle of their busiest stretch. I picked up 11 active files at $325 each, flat, invoiced at close, on a two month engagement. All 11 closed. Two closed late by 3 and 6 days respectively, both lender-side.

How it actually went. Day one I built one shared date sheet for all 11 in a single spreadsheet, columns for the file, the next hard date, and the one person I was waiting on. That sheet was the entire product. I sent it every Friday at 4 and after week two the team lead stopped asking me for updates because the answer was always already in front of him.

Hours: 63 across the two months, so about 5.7 per file, $3,575 total, roughly $57 an hour. Heavier than I expected in week one because the departing coordinator left nothing behind except her calendar invites, and I had to rebuild every date off the executed contracts. That was 14 hours of the 63 before I coordinated anything at all.

The part that nearly broke it. On one file the written buyer agreement had never been signed. The brokerage's compliance review caught it, not me, and I'd had the file for nine days by then. It got resolved and the closing wasn't affected, but I'd been treating the compliance checklist as the brokerage's job and my checklist as the contract dates. Those are two different lists and I only had one of them. I now pull the brokerage's required document list on intake and reconcile it before I look at a single deadline. What documentation a brokerage requires varies by state and by brokerage, so it's a question I ask on every new engagement rather than something I assume.

What I'd keep: the single sheet across all files instead of eleven separate trackers, and the Friday 4pm send whether or not there's news. What I'd change: I'd have charged a rebuild fee for the 14 hours of reconstructing dates on files somebody else had already opened.

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1nicole_adeyemiPassivePRO5

Two things sound easier here than they are.

The 5.7 hours per file average is doing a lot of hiding. Eleven files that were already in motion means the hardest weeks of each one were mostly behind you, inspection negotiations done, disclosures already circulating. If you'd taken 11 files at day one of contract instead of day 20, I'd guess the number is 8 or 9 and the two months turn into 90 hours, which puts you nearer $40 an hour at $325. Do you have the per-file spread rather than the average? The tail is the interesting part.

And the compliance miss went nine days and cost nothing, which is luck sitting in the middle of a win post. If that file had been three days from closing when the review hit it, or if the brokerage's review had been monthly instead of rolling, the story is a delayed closing and a client who's evaluating whether the overflow coordinator caused it. Your fix is the right fix. It arrived because a control you weren't running caught it.

One variable I'd want to know about: what happens to the Friday sheet if two files have hard dates on the same Tuesday and one of them needs four hours that day? At 11 files across two months you probably never hit that. At 20 you would.

Took 11 overflow files from a team mid-transition and got all 11 closed

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