Handed draw tracking to a VA. Lost $6,200 to a lien I never saw.

Three property rehab, running about $310k of combined budget, and I moved draw tracking and lien waiver collection to a VA in month two because I was drowning.

The process I gave her: collect a conditional waiver before each progress payment, unconditional after the payment clears, file both in the shared drive by property and by trade. She did it. Every folder was complete. I checked twice and it looked right.

What I didn't give her was a rule about what to do when a sub sends a waiver that doesn't match the payment amount. The framing crew sent an unconditional waiver for $14,800 against a payment of $21,000, because their invoice included a $6,200 material charge they'd financed through a supplier. She filed it. It was in the folder. It was signed. It just covered less than I'd paid.

The supplier filed against the property four months later. I paid it twice, once through the framer and once directly, and I have a claim against the framer that I will probably not collect on.

The cost was $6,200 plus about $1,900 in title and legal cleanup to clear it before I could sell, and three weeks on the closing date.

The failure wasn't the VA. She executed the process I wrote exactly. The process had no amount reconciliation step because when I did it myself I reconciled in my head without noticing that I was doing it. That's the whole lesson. The thing you hand over is the written process, and the written process is always missing the judgment you never had to name.

Lien law, waiver forms, and who can file against a property vary a lot by state, and mine has its own required form language, so anyone reading this should get their own state's rules from an attorney rather than from my version.

What I'd do differently. Before handing off anything, do the task myself five times while narrating out loud into a recording, then write the process from the recording instead of from memory. The narration catches the checks you don't know you're making. And put a hard rule in every financial process that any figure not matching another figure stops and comes to me, with no exceptions and no judgment required from the person holding it.