On the residential side of the real estate brokerage industry, there are people known as transaction coordinators who will work along with the agents on their sale transactions, and basically do most of the follow-up once the agreement to sell a home has been signed by both buyer and seller. So these transaction coordinators will then directly interact with both the buyer and the seller and their representatives, and both follow-up on and coordinate things such as the progress of the overall transaction, the loan approval process, the contingency dates, inspections, and the majority of the general communication with everyone involved in the transaction, so that the agent can then free up all of that time to go out and develop more new business. In addition, it’s not uncommon for one of these coordinators to charge just $350.00 to $500.00 or so for doing all of this work on a transaction, and oftentimes they won’t charge anything if the sale doesn’t close.
Now imagine all of the time that you normally spend moving a deal forward towards closing after you’ve obtained a signed purchase agreement between the two parties, and imagine how much time this would now free up for you if you had someone like this available to work for you. If your time is worth $200.00 to $500.00 an hour when you’re being productive, and you could pay someone just $350.00 to $500.00 in total to do most all of the follow-up work for you on the transaction, wouldn’t this represent a tremendous exchange of your money for getting this more valuable, productive time back again?
While I’ve mentioned that these types of coordinators are fairly common on the residential side of the business, it’s rare for me to find a commercial broker who has ever utilized one of them in their own transactions, and it’s more common when the commercial broker is in an office that also has residential agents within it, and they’ll then utilize a coordinator who is making their services available to the residential agents within that office.
So this, in my opinion, represents a huge void that’s just waiting to be filled by people to provide this kind of service within our industry, as I believe that once brokers understand that someone like this is available to them, especially at the rate that I’ve mentioned, many brokers would then recognize the value, and they’d move forward and begin utilizing someone like this.
Within major commercial real estate brokerage teams, there will oftentimes be one broker who has this responsibility to fulfill for the team, but for brokers who are working solo and on their own within a brokerage office, without being a member of a brokerage team within the office, finding someone who will provide this service could be a very welcome and profitable relief for them.
So if you know of someone or a company that is already doing a great job of providing these services to commercial brokers, and they have the capacity to take on even more new business, let me know! In the meantime, consider approaching an agent or a manager within a local residential brokerage company, and ask them if they have a transaction coordinator who they would recommend to you. The person may not be an expert at working on commercial transactions right now, but there are so many similarities in moving a sale transaction forward, that will definitely still apply.