Video Transcript

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Brian Icenhower: Hey, everybody. It’s Brian Icenhower. I wanna talk about the transaction coordinator role on a real estate team. And again, this takes lots of different forms depending on how big your team is. So just a quick recap. When you first hire your first admin, they’re doing a lot of listing manager work and a lot of transaction coordinator work and not much marketing director work at all, and probably no administrative manager work. But as you grow, you start to break these apart a little bit and you have two people running one and two running the other until ultimately you have four different people in every one of these roles. So what I really wanna focus in here is number two, and that’s that transaction coordinator that handles both buyer and seller clients of yours all the way from contract to closing, and what that looks like. I wanna isolate that role and talk about it.

The first thing that I want you to understand is, I know this bores everybody. Like business plans, people create one of these and never look at it again. But guys, the job description is crucial with all admin positions, really all positions. Because when they start, generally speaking, most transaction coordinators think their role is handling contract to close and all the necessary items to get transactions closed. And if you don’t pull out this job description on the regular and show that no, you’re responsible for running the marketing side out of it, too. You’re the one that knows when the under contracts need to go out. You’re the one that’s doing the communication with the client on a weekly basis, because I don’t want my agents doing that. In fact, when my clients call, I want them to call you, not the agent. You’re more available. You know what’s happening real time with the transaction. So I want you proactively reaching out to them. I want you doing a lot of things with marketing, because you’re gonna be the one that tells the marketing director when things need to go out and by when. So it’s not just a simple checklist of here’s all the items we need to do and complete to get this contract closed. That is not the role, because the stronger the admin, the stronger the real estate team.

There are three things that we provide as a real estate team to our clients, and our clients are our agents. And I’ll tell you right now, the three things that a team provides to its agents are some sort of leads, coaching, mentoring, accountability, and strong admin. That’s where most people are very weak. They pay transaction coordinators by the file, or they don’t pay them that much. They’ll really try to be skinny on the admin because expenses are scary. It’s hard paying people every two weeks when you don’t have production. So that’s where the big Achilles heel shows up and most agents leave teams saying, “I can just go do the same thing, get a transaction coordinator by the file. Sometimes even hire the same one, and I don’t get anything else from the team.” So you see that turnover. It’s just too lean for retention and certainly not gonna help you with recruiting.

But I can’t tell you how many experienced agents that are trying to slow down, that have 10 to 15 transactions come to them a year, have tons of influence because everybody respects them in the local real estate community, maybe don’t do that much, but they bring your team 10 to 15 transactions a year and give you a lot of influence that attracts other top producers to the team, because most teams just have a bunch of non-producers that look for you for mentoring with transactions until they don’t need mentoring anymore, then they go off on their own. So we need to have stronger value. There are tons of seasoned agents that really want all that taken off their plate. They’re seeing what’s happening with all the marketing that’s out there, all the social media, people have really upped their marketing game in a big way. They can’t keep up with that. They don’t wanna keep up with that. They don’t wanna keep up with the nightmare closings, especially during the summer and the busy seasons. So you get a lot of halfway golden handshakes where people say, “I’m gonna go over there and I’m just gonna meet with my clients and find them property and list their property, and I’m gonna have these people handle all the other stuff.” One of the biggest weaknesses I see starts with the transaction coordinator’s job description. So I’m gonna show that to you.

So you can see here, this is actually a long job description. It goes two pages and it covers contract to close management. This is all the stuff they need to do, and they expect they need to do. But they also need to communicate with the clients and take communication with the clients away from the agent as much as they can. And the better the transaction coordinator, the more contact they’re gonna have instead of the agent. They’re gonna coordinate obviously with agents, lenders, and escrow. They’re gonna make sure everything’s compliant, with the brokerage or the office. And they’re gonna work a lot on closing prep and follow through because we’re gonna need marketing after closing to try to get more referrals, to try to create a better client experience and they’re gonna have to coordinate after closing to make sure that we’re going after online reviews and referrals and all those other things coming down the road. I’m not gonna go into detail. You can grab this from me.

But here’s the other reason. This is probably the most important reason for a job description. When you first bring someone on, there’s no way they’re gonna be able to do all that. You may not even know how to tell them how to do it yet. You just wanna implement it later. Especially brand new transaction coordinators, they’re gonna try to develop their systems from contract to close, and everything else is when we get to it. The key is you gotta remind them they’re not doing their full job yet. Because if you try to come back a year or two later and say, “Now I want you to do this,” they’re gonna say, “That’s great. That’s more work, though. How much more do I get paid for that?” They gotta understand there’s a long training period here. It maybe lasts a year or two. Right up front they have to know that, and it could be the reason that we increase pay salaries, ’cause you’re not doing the full job. We have to train you for a long time here. And what ends up happening is, over time they’re gonna master these systems, they’re gonna compress those systems because they’ll get fast at them, and then there’ll be room to add on more, and that needs to be explained every single time for lots of reasons. They have to learn that we’re gonna keep adding, and it may take up to a year or two before you have all your systems and you’re running efficiently.

And that’s one of the biggest problems we find with time management with agents, is that, especially during the busy seasons of the year, they tend to overwork. Any human would. They’re used to operating at a very slow level, going out and getting their latte midday. And then all of a sudden the busy season hits, and it’s, oh my gosh, they’re out of shape. They’re completely out of endurance. And what happens is over the busy season they feel like they hate this job, especially for those of you that have busy seasons that are in the spring and the summer, when they probably also have kids out of school and trying to take vacations.

So we have to prep them for that up front before we hire them, and then prep them for it before we move into the busy season, because this is what’s about to happen. We gotta prep them: hey, maybe if you’re taking summer vacations, take them in July and August, not in June, because June for those people that have summer, that’s the busy time of the year. That’s when we’re both writing contracts and closing at a high level, ’cause we write a lot of contracts in May and June and we close a lot in May and June. July we’re typically just closing more, and then August. So it’s a little bit easier at that time. Plus, you got 4th of July mixed in there, and a lot of people take a week or two off at that time, so it slows. Getting people to take off around 4th of July, that’s a great time for a summer vacation. So just prepping them on that. And even if they don’t take your advice, ’cause you can’t control when they wanna take all their vacations, but understand you can say, “Hey, I told you it’s gonna be tough the week before, and when you’re gone, and the week when you come back,” ’cause it’s hard to enjoy a vacation in June.

I’ll tell you that right now. So let them know up front, and then talk about the bandwidth of this position. I can tell you right now that an experienced, well-structured, full service admin can handle 40 pending transactions at any time, and there aren’t many that can handle that. There just aren’t, especially full service ones that are actually coordinating with marketing, coordinating with listing, taking over client communication, all of that type of stuff. But experienced ones can. We’ve seen many do it. But understand they won’t be able to handle 40 their first year. You’ll be lucky if they can handle 20 pending their first year because they’re just not efficient at it yet. They haven’t had enough time in the chair learning how to do it. It takes time. If we’re not very careful with pulling out the job description every quarter to go over it to see which types of duties we can add next, they’re not gonna ever learn to go past that 20 transactions. We have to let them compress the systems they’ve learned and then add new tasks from the job descriptions at least every quarter, so then they can learn those and master them and then compress them down to efficient time and then keep adding and keep adding till we have the full job description.

And most people think of admin as an afterthought. All they’re concerned about is lead generation and getting more business and more agents, and they leave admin and operations completely on the back burner. But we have to be growing those job descriptions regularly to get that endurance up, or they’re just gonna get comfortable at their current level and never learn to get better, if that makes sense. So we have to be upfront and explain that you’re gonna learn all this, that we’re gonna give them time, and here’s why. Learn to say, “Hey, good admins can handle up to 40 pending. Your ears are gonna start smoking at 20.” And we have to set that expectation moving forward because that is a crucial value add the team provides to its agents.

You’ll see the teams that don’t have strong admin doing all of this, they have either a lot of turnover. They lose a lot of agents to just going on their own or going to other teams that have stronger admin, and more importantly, their agent population is just a bunch of new agents, and it’s very hard to get top agents. So you’ll be stigmatized: “I’ve got the new agent team,” so no talented, experienced, seasoned agents are going to want to join your team because you’ve established yourself that’s where new agents go. Why would I ever, in front of the entire real estate industry, demote myself that I need to go back on your team? And so it’s very important. If you want agents that bring you a lot of business from strong databases, strong spheres of influence, one of the key ways to do that is through strong admin and having strong admin systems and paying a little attention to it. It doesn’t need to be your focus, but every quarter or so, we gotta try to add more and keep building those job descriptions out and reminding them that’s how it works.

What I’ll do, just like with the listing manager doing a first call checklist, is the minute that we go under contract, the listing manager is gonna explain there’s a baton passing right now. It’s gonna be a situation where we explain, “Hey, you’re gonna start working with a new customer service specialist that just focuses on contract to close ’cause a little bit more is involved there. She’s coordinating with tons of different people but here’s her phone number, here’s her email address. She’s gonna be reaching out to you the minute we go under contract, whenever that is.” And the minute we go under contract, it is a telephone call. Could be a text to set up the telephone call, but it is a telephone call. I know in the admin world, we like to hide behind emails, but guys, we gotta take away client communication, and most people don’t like emails. I love ’em, but I’m weird that way. And you’re gonna learn, and you’re gonna look at that first call checklist that the listing manager created about their communication preferences. Now, I’ll tell you, even if it says email, that they like emails too, you’re gonna still call ’em because we need that personal relationship. Say, “Hey, I’m gonna be working with you all the way through.” And then you’re gonna set the expectation that you’re gonna head off client communication ’cause remember, the goal here, just like with the listing manager, is to get them to call you, not to call the top agent.

The top agent needs to be out there recruiting, lead generating, going on listing presentations, whatever, on offense. And quite frankly, they don’t know what’s going on. They’re panicked, and they’re usually a hot mess. So we’ve gotta take away that relationship, and we don’t just take it away in a rough way. We gotta earn it, so we really wanna reach out and explain the things that we already know from the listing call checklist, as if she’s had a conversation with the listing manager. Confirm some things and tell ’em, “Hey, every week you’re gonna be getting an email from me at this time on this day that’s gonna tell you everything I’ve been doing, everything we’re about to do that’s coming up next, and it’s gonna remind you of all the key deadlines.” Like, for example, when are our inspections gonna be held? ‘Cause I’m gonna be setting all those up and I’m gonna be communicating with you to set all those up. When are our contingencies going to be waived? When are the disclosures due? What’s our closing date? All of that, you’re gonna be reminded of those in that email every single day. I’m gonna tell you what we did, what we’re gonna do, and remind you of all the key dates. And then I’m gonna probably call you, and you don’t need to answer that phone call, but I want you to call me if you have any questions, because I’m the one that knows everything that’s going on.

Brian our lead agent, he’s amazing at selling houses and getting things going. But he uses his mouth, I use my brain. And I really want you to put the agent down. He’s the salesman, I’m your customer service concierge. I’m here for you, so please call me. You have my number. I’m sending you my contact. And you can text them the contact so they have it in their phone to call you. Because you can judge the strength of an admin by how many phone calls you get as the lead agent. And if you get a lot, that means the admin is not winning over the relationship.

So we really want a soft glove transfer here that actually doesn’t feel awkward, that it actually impresses them. We want to create that wow customer service client experience. And so I want them to always know that I’m gonna be calling them every single week, and they’re also gonna get an email, so that if they have these impulse questions that they feel like they need to reach out and call the agent that they personally know, they know we’re gonna be calling them every Thursday. So they don’t have to freak out about it on the weekends, on Sunday nights when they get home from work, and make the agents’ lives miserable. We want the dentists to love the customer service provided by the hygienists so that people actually prefer them and prefer going to them. It’s absolutely crucial for pulling client communication away. So let them know when it’s coming. Let them know a phone call’s coming too. You don’t need to answer.

Please call me. If they ever do call the lead agent, say, “I told you not to call him. You call me because he’s gonna just call me and ask me anyway.” You literally have to train them how you want them to act. And it may be different than other agents they’ve had in the past, and they will like this better if you follow this system. They’ll say, “Wow, these guys are amazing, man. They’re all over me. I never have to call them. They always call me. It’s fabulous.”

With time management, we have a checklist that we follow, and again, I’m not gonna go into a lot of detail about it, but you can clearly see what I’m talking about. Again, you guys can download this. It shows how many days after a contract’s accepted, and this is the buyer closing checklist, and when it’s completed. And then we also over here to the side put, a lot of things we’re relying on other people for. Lenders, inspectors, title officers, things like that. And so I need when we requested it, and then I also need to know when it was received. So that way, as we’re working down through the days on the checklist, we can say, “Whoops, we still haven’t gotten that. I gotta bark at them again and get that.” So we can’t ever say it’s them because they didn’t get it to me on time.

No, you drive the bus. Strong admin drives the bus and makes sure we get these people. And there might even be a call to the lead agent saying, “Hey, I need you to call that lender because I cannot get this, and I need this.” You see what I’m saying? You’re the leader as the transaction coordinator. So how many days typically after acceptance we need to get things done is listed here. Now, that will change if you have short transactions versus long transactions and things like that. And then it gets really hot five days before closing. There’s a lot of stuff going on day of closing, a lot going on. Then after closing, we’re doing a lot of customer service, a lot of marketing and things like that after closing. So again, you’re coordinating with that marketing director and the lead agent to make sure things are getting done. You’re also gonna be ordering the lead agent around a lot here. And you can see down at the bottom, we always put the key contract dates and deadlines that are listed. Why? They’re gonna go in our weekly emails. Here’s contact information for all of your key people that you’re gonna work with through the transaction along with when all these things are gonna occur. And we’re just gonna copy and paste that basically into that email to our clients, so they’re up to date just like we are, and they’re gonna love it. They’ve never seen that type of organization coming from someone that represented them in real estate in the past.

Now, we have a similar checklist for the listing side, it’s pretty similar all the way down with the contracts and dates that you use. The last thing is you’re gonna, as you meet with your team especially your lead agent, you’re gonna have a pending checklist. They don’t like a lot of detail. I like to see all of our checklists in Google Drive. That way you can share access to them with everybody, each agent. Some people use a program called Slack out there. It’s an app that they use, so that every agent that’s on board on the file has access to it, and the lead agent, the rainmaker, the team leader, has access to all of them. And I like Google because it speaks everybody else’s language.

And I like to set my files up every file, every day. And this is my law. The number one law in managing admin is every file every day, which means typically as an admin, you’re less busy in the morning. You’re gonna organize in different files all of the transactions you have going. Listing manager too. And they’re labeled by the address, not by the name of the person, ’cause they can buy and sell two properties or multiple properties. So we label them by address. Every email communication you send out to anyone has the address as the subject line. That way it’s easily searchable when they save their emails.

From a time management perspective, in the morning when agents should be lead generating or recruiting or making their recruiting calls, I want you to go through every single file, and at the top of that file should be your checklist, along with all the other documents you have. And I want you to work down the checklist as far as you can, every single file, every day, first thing. Why? Why first thing? If you get in at 8:30 in the morning, real estate industry doesn’t wake up till 10:30 or 11:00. So you can actually get through them without a lot of interruptions. If the agent’s interrupting you, they should be lead generating. They should be recruiting. They should be doing their work then. So everybody’s doing their own big rocks that they’re working on in the morning. And usually the agent calls and a lot of the other calls don’t start happening until 10:30, 11:00. It’s usually 10:00 to 2:00. Definitely 11:00 to 1:00 is when most people in real estate work.

So we really want to be pushing every file every day prior to that, because that’s when you’re gonna have the least interruptions. Then everybody’s getting back to us throughout the day. Then we’ve got our job done. We’re operating by design in the morning. Then we’re just operating by default in the afternoon. They’re coming to us, everybody’s responding to us, everybody’s asking us things, opening new files, things like that, client communication, all of it’s happening after that. But first thing you do is go every file every day, every single day, and we try to push down the checklist and get everything marked off as fast as we can, and then we come back and respond to everything.

You’re typically also gonna have a pending inventory pipeline that we’re gonna be showing them, and that’s the same thing. It’s basically at a glance. So this is what we’re gonna usually meet with our team about every week or at least the lead agent, where we can see every single client and where we’re at a glance. And any communication that needs to be happening about these pendings that has not occurred will happen. We can see what’s coming and where we’re at. So that’s just a nice scoreboard of what we’ve got under contract right now, so we can see the big picture, and it stirs up conversations about it, and it shows the prospective close dates, and we typically wanna put the most urgent close dates at the top and then go backwards so that we know these are the ones we have coming up. Here’s how many we have closing. It’ll really help your agents get an idea of when closings are coming up. We know that when closings are coming up, there’s gonna be a lot more communication, there’s gonna be a lot more tasks that we need to pay attention to, and it reminds the admins, oh, these are my focus ones right now, ’cause I’m getting into that five-day before close area where things are extremely busy. Showing that is very important.

The other point that I wanna make here is you’re gonna see on the checklist, we don’t want the client relationship to be lost between the lead agent and the client. What I want is I want the lead agent to be contacting the client out of nowhere at certain moments of celebration in the transaction. For example, after we get it under contract, I want the agent reaching out. After we have an open house that 20 people attend, I want the agent reaching out and congratulating them. I want the agent reaching out after the property appraises on the listing side. I want them to celebrate. I’m saying, “Guys, a lot of these houses don’t appraise right now, so you should celebrate. This is good news. I’m relieved to hear it.” I want the agent reaching out when all of the inspection contingencies have been negotiated and say, “Hey, we’re clear to close. We’re moving forward here.” Loan contingencies have been removed, things like that. And then after closing, of course, because I want the agent to always be associated with good news, and I want them to feel good about contacting their clients. I want them to be happy times. I want them to remember for referral purposes and five-star review purposes, I want them to remember the good times.

So I do want there to be a lot of communication. I just don’t want the agent to be the problem solver associated with that. I want the good customer service person who’s used to solving them all the time getting better at that communication. That’s why in the profile, we wanna see a strong S because they’re really good at that customer service and don’t get panicked by it. A C keeps us compliant, but if we have too much C and not enough S, we’ve got poor bedside manners oftentimes, and they aren’t the best at soothing the client. So we have to be aware of that because we do see that in this industry a lot. High C’s because we’re so worried about dotting every I and crossing every T, but not a lot of good customer communication there.

So we gotta work on getting that S up and really keeping customer service first of mind here ’cause that’s our goal: five-star reviews and future client referrals, of course. So that’s the key. But it’s every file every single day, and we’re trying to take as much off the agent’s plate so that they have no excuse and they have to lead generate for more business and do what they’re supposed to be doing to grow their businesses. Because the agents are our clients just as much as the clients are our clients. So we have to remember that. As much as agents annoy us, we’re here to add value to them, and admin is one of the most underrated ways to do it and most needed ways to do it out there. So hope this helps.