Best Practices for Efficient Transaction Management in Real Estate

Your clients have gone under contract, now what? Transaction management in real estate plays a crucial role in client satisfaction and business success. The best practices outlined in this blog will give real estate agents and other transaction coordinators the ability to manage their transactions with ease. These tips and tricks will help you streamline your processes and elevate your transaction coordination game.

Let’s first talk about a solid foundation. Before you start your first file, it is important to lay out everything you will need to get started. And what does this look like? A clear means of communication between you and the client is your first priority. Find out how they best communicate (via email, text, or phone calls) and have your systems in place to support all three.

Next up is your checklists. These are going to be your bible from start to finish. Lay out an entire real estate transaction, all of the deadlines, the check ins, everything. Create your own comprehensive checklists allowing you to never skip a beat. You need one for your daily tasks, and one for compliance. Keeping track of your compliance documents as you go will only help you in the end. Checking off both of these lists will help you feel like a rockstar, but will also ensure that your transactions are always moving forward (and you aren’t left in the dust).

With these checklists, comes automation. We are talking email templates, and much much more. Draft your emails ahead of time. Specifically your intro emails, check in emails, final walk through, and closing emails. Many of the emails we send out when managing a transaction can be copy and paste, and of course there are still some you write on the fly.

TRACKING. In all caps. Have a comprehensive spreadsheet, with all of the information you need for a transaction on it. Client’s information, closer information, purchase price, commission amount, lender information, all of the above and more. You will be referring back to this almost every day, and it ensures that you always have your ducks (or transactions) in a row.

With your checklists and tracking, time management has to be in there somewhere. Especially when you are managing more than one transaction at a time. Go down your list of transactions every day, from the closest closing date to the furthest. Check off each task as you go down the line focusing on one at a time. Pause when other emails and tasks come in, but always go back to your list. Trying to catch up on one transaction at a time will help you focus on one thing at a time, and if you do this every day, will give you a comprehensive idea of where all of your transactions are at.

With that pause for other emails and tasks, can come “FIRES” as we like to call them. Things happening in real time that require problem solving on the spot, or fires to be put out. Whether you are a real estate agent or transaction coordinator, make sure you are collaborating with all parties to try and find a solution to the problem at hand. 2 heads are always better than one. Just be prepared address challenges as they come.

Lastly, we do all of this for our clients. They need to be at the forefront of our minds throughout the entire transaction process. Tailor your systems to each client. Maybe one is a first time home buyer and needs more check ins than most. Maybe one only talks on the phone and you need to call them frequently to relay information. Whatever the case may be, the most important best practice for time management in real estate is adaptability. Create your systems, lay a good foundation, adapt to each transaction, and you are on your way to seamless transaction management.