I cannot tell you how many times I opened a new transaction file and immediately hit a wall. I had the contract. I had the parties. What I didn't have was the name of the lender, the title rep, the escrow officer — any of the cooperating professionals the agent had already been talking to for days.
And getting that information? That was its own project.
Here's what usually happened. I'd send the agent a message asking for the contact info for the lender they were using. They'd reply hours later with a first name and a phone number. No company. No email. No last name. I'd follow up. They'd send me a screenshot of a text thread. The screenshot would be blurry or cut off right before the part I needed. I'd try to track down the person through the company website, guess at the email format, and hope for the best. Meanwhile, time-sensitive deadlines were ticking away in the background.
I want to be fair to agents here, because I am one. Agents are not trying to make your life harder. They're juggling multiple clients, handling showings, writing offers, dealing with emotional buyers and sellers, and trying to remember which transaction is in which stage. When they choose a lender or confirm an escrow officer, they're not thinking about documentation. They're thinking about the next step in front of them. The follow-up coordination piece — that's not always top of mind. That's actually why transaction coordinators exist. But when TCs can't get the basic contact details they need to do their job, the whole system slows down.
What I eventually realized is that the problem wasn't that agents were being unhelpful. The problem was that there was no clear moment in the process where that information was expected to be collected and handed off. It was informal, it was assumed, and it fell through the cracks constantly. I'd be reaching out to an escrow officer I'd never spoken to, introducing myself mid-transaction, not sure if they even knew a TC had been assigned. That's an awkward position to be in, and it doesn't set anyone up for a smooth close.
For TCs, this is one of those friction points that doesn't show up on any checklist but eats up a surprising amount of your time and energy. You're not doing compliance work or managing contingency dates in those moments — you're playing phone tag trying to confirm who the lender even is. That's not where your expertise should be going. Your value is in managing the process once you have the pieces. The missing piece here is a defined, expected intake of cooperating professional information at the start of every transaction, before the file even gets moving.
When I built Traicee, getting agent-submitted contact information for every party in the transaction — lender, title, escrow, co-op agent, whoever is involved — was something I thought about carefully. Not because it's glamorous, but because I knew from personal experience how much it mattered. If a TC has to chase that information down, something in the handoff process broke. The intake should do that work upfront so nothing has to be hunted down later.
If this is a struggle you're dealing with right now, I'd love to hear how you're handling it — and I'm happy to show you how Traicee approaches it. Reach out anytime.