What does a transaction coordinator do?

A transaction coordinator takes a ratified contract and runs it to closing: extracting every deadline, opening title and escrow, ordering the disclosure and HOA packages, chasing signatures, tracking lender conditions, and keeping every party informed. The core of the job is owning the timeline so the agent does not have to.

What is a transaction coordinator not allowed to do?

An unlicensed TC cannot give advice on price, terms, or whether to accept an offer, cannot negotiate on a client's behalf, and cannot solicit business as an agent would. Anything that requires a licensee's judgment stays with the agent. The line is advice, not administration.

When should an agent hire a transaction coordinator?

The usual trigger is around two closings a month, or the point where deadline chasing starts eating the hours that would have gone to new business. The honest test is not deal count, it is whether you have missed or nearly missed a date in the last quarter.

From the blogCoordination

What a transaction coordinator actually does

Everyone agrees a TC "handles the paperwork," which explains nothing. Here is the real job, hour by hour, and the part of it that is not administrative at all.

YayTrack TeamEditorialJun 25, 2026 · 8 min read

Ask ten agents what a transaction coordinator does and you get ten versions of "handles the paperwork." That is true in the way "a pilot flies the plane" is true. It describes the job without describing any of the work, and it is why so many agents hire late, hire wrong, or decide they do not need one.

Here is the actual shape of it.

The job starts at ratification, not at signing

The moment a contract ratifies, it stops being a negotiation and becomes a schedule. Every obligation in it attaches to a date or a dollar amount, and someone has to lift each one out before the clock starts running against you. That first pass is the highest-leverage hour in the whole file, and it is the TC's.

Effective date established, because every other date counts from it
Earnest money deadline, delivery method, and who confirms receipt
Inspection or option window, with the walk-away date named
Appraisal ordering date and the contingency it feeds
Financing contingency and the loan approval date underneath it
Title order placed, commitment review window calendared
HOA or condo resale package ordered, with its real lead time
Settlement date, and the Closing Disclosure delivery date that gates it

A good TC does this the day of ratification. A file where these dates get pulled on day three has already lost the buffer that would have absorbed the first surprise.

Then it is mostly chasing, and chasing is a skill

Most of the middle of a file is asking people for things they have not sent yet. Lenders for conditions, sellers for disclosures, HOAs for packages, title for the commitment, buyers for signatures. It sounds trivial. It is not, because the difference between a TC who chases well and one who does not is roughly the difference between a file that closes on time and one that does not.

Chasing well means knowing which requests have long lead times and starting those first, knowing who actually answers versus who forwards, escalating on a schedule instead of on a feeling, and keeping a written trail so a dispute later has a record. The unskilled version is sending the same email three times and calling it follow-up.

The paperwork is the artifact. The job is the timeline, and the timeline is a series of other people's homework.

The part nobody calls administrative

A coordinator sees far more files than any single agent does, which means they see failure patterns first. The appraisal that came in low and the addendum that was written badly in response. The HOA package ordered nine days before a five-day review window. The wire instructions that changed by email.

That pattern recognition is the part of the role that is genuinely hard to replace, and it is why "just get a VA" is a mismatch. A general assistant can send an email. Knowing that this particular email needs to go out today, because the resale certificate takes ten to fourteen days and settlement is in three weeks, is domain knowledge.

What a TC is not

This matters more than agents expect, and getting it wrong creates real liability.

Not a licensee's substitute. An unlicensed TC cannot advise on price or terms, cannot negotiate, and cannot answer "should I accept this?" Those stay with the agent.
Not a transaction lawyer. Interpreting an ambiguous clause is not clerical work.
Not a decision-maker. A TC surfaces that a deadline is at risk. What to do about it is the agent's call, and often the client's.
Not a lead generator. Coordination and prospecting are different jobs, and asking one person to do both usually means neither gets done.

The clean line is advice versus administration. Everything that requires a licensee's judgment belongs to the agent. Everything that requires someone to own a date belongs to the coordinator.

How the day actually runs

A working coordinator with fifteen to twenty-five active files spends the morning on what is due today and what is at risk this week, the middle of the day on new ratifications and the extraction pass above, and the end of the day on the chase list. Closings get a dedicated pass in the final seventy-two hours, because that is where the settlement statement reconciliation and the wire confirmation live.

The volume a coordinator can hold is not really about how fast they type. It is about how much of the tracking lives in a system rather than in their head. A coordinator running everything off memory and a spreadsheet tops out early and fails suddenly. One with a real deadline engine behind them scales until the chasing itself becomes the constraint.

The honest hiring signal

Agents usually ask "how many deals do I need before a TC pays for itself?" The number people quote is around two closings a month, and it is a reasonable starting point. But it is the wrong test.

The better test: in the last quarter, did you miss a deadline, or catch one late enough that it was luck rather than process? Did you spend an evening reconstructing where a file stood? If yes, you were already paying for a coordinator. You were just paying in your own hours, at the worst possible exchange rate, and absorbing the risk yourself.