Personal Assistant or Transaction Coordinator?? Step #1 For Building A Real Estate Team
Lead generating, listings, phone calls, and contracts. With deadlines and addenda stored across different calendars, systems, and sticky notes, in addition to 7,948 unread emails, you may feel more like a professional juggler at the circus than a Realtor.
When you just can't handle it all - It is important to know who to hire and WHEN! Personal Assistants and Transaction Coordinators have distinct roles and functions. Knowing the differences between these support roles is critical when building a Real Estate Team.
Personal Assistant: Handles social media management, creates open house postcards & sold flyers, responsible for CRM management or email campaigns.
Pros: Ability to assign them other projects, like picking up your dry cleaning.
Cons: Hourly or Salary payment due every two weeks - whether you are closing deals OR NOT! They also need YOU to tell them what to do (and maybe how to do it!) You create their daily task list and oversee its completion. If you are new to real estate, you may not know exactly what needs to be worked on OR if you are overloaded, the last thing you need to become is a babysitter!
Transaction Coordinator: Processes documents for signatures, schedules inspections and closings, submits paperwork to your brokerage for compliance, keeps track of deadlines, handles disclosures and those pesky CCRS.
Pros: Payment is only due AT CLOSING! If you don't get paid - neither do they. Transaction coordinators have proven systems in place to get you to closing. No hand holding or needed.
Cons: Not always in your office (might work from home - or another location). Not typically available for outside projects.
OVERALL: Eventually your Real Estate team will need BOTH of these key players. But for your first hire - a transaction coordinator is less of a financial risk. They only get paid when you do so you don't need to fear a bi-weekly payroll. A Transaction Coordinator is a "Cost of Sale" or in other words, just a cost of doing business like your brokerage fee. Some agents think that they are busier than they actually are - so after a few weeks of hiring their new personal assistant there is no more work to be done! Also, the hassle of interviewing, hiring, and training can be exhausting. Hiring a "per contract" Transaction Coordinator eliminates that headache.
Either way you go - hiring administrative support can be the best thing that you do for your business.