I went into my first round of demos feeling pretty confident. Almost 30 years in real estate, I'd worked alongside a lot of transaction coordinators. I thought I had a solid read on what they needed. I was wrong in some important ways, and I'm genuinely glad I found out before I shipped something that missed the mark.
The Demo That Stopped Me Cold
About three weeks into showing early builds to TCs, I sat down on a Zoom call with a coordinator who had been doing this work for over a decade. She ran files for six agents simultaneously. I walked her through the checklist automation I was proud of, and she was polite about it. Then she said something I've thought about nearly every day since. She said, 'Marque, the checklist isn't the hard part. The hard part is knowing which agent is going to blow past a deadline and figuring out how to remind them in a way that doesn't make them defensive.' I actually stopped the demo. I just asked her to keep talking.
Over the next hour she described what her job actually felt like from the inside. It wasn't about tracking tasks. It was about managing relationships, reading personalities, absorbing stress so the transaction didn't fall apart. She kept people calm. She translated between agents and lenders and title reps who all used slightly different language and had slightly different expectations. She was essentially a human buffer layer holding a deal together through sheer professionalism and institutional knowledge. I had built a glorified to-do list. That was not what she needed.
I ran maybe fifteen more demos after that, and I started asking different questions. Instead of showing features and asking what they thought, I asked TCs to walk me through the worst week they'd had in the last six months. What nearly fell apart. What they had to catch at the last minute. What communication had gone sideways and why. The answers were remarkably consistent. The pain was almost never about forgetting a step. It was about timing, tone, and the cognitive load of holding every moving piece in their head while new fires started. One TC told me she kept a personal notes file on every agent she worked with just to remember their quirks, their communication preferences, whether they read texts or ignored them. She'd built her own system out of necessity because nothing she'd tried actually supported that kind of relational knowledge.
What I Had to Go Back and Rebuild
I went back to my AI tools and started over on several core pieces. The communication drafting had to get smarter about context and tone, not just content. The deadline tracking had to account for the fact that some agents need a nudge three days out and some need it the morning of or they still won't move. The notes and file history had to be built in a way that actually served a TC's memory and judgment, not just created a paper trail for compliance. I'm not going to pretend I got all of it right on the next pass. But I got it pointed in a much better direction because real TCs told me the truth when I finally stopped talking long enough to hear it.
What This Means If You're a TC or You Work With One
If you're a transaction coordinator, I want you to know that the people building tools for you don't always understand your job as well as they think they do. That's on us, not you. Your work is genuinely complex, and it requires a kind of professional intuition that takes years to develop. Any software worth your time should be built around that reality, not around someone's simplified idea of what a TC does. The reason I named this platform Traicee after a TC named Tracy who helped me survive my first year is because I've always believed TCs are underestimated. I'm trying to build something that reflects what they actually are, which is some of the most skilled professionals in this industry.
If you're an agent or broker reading this, go ask your TC what the hardest part of their week is. Not the busiest part. The hardest part. You might be surprised by the answer, and you might start to see what they actually carry so your deals close the way they do.
Still Building, Still Listening
Traicee is still evolving, and I'm still running demos and still asking TCs to tell me where I'm getting it wrong. If you want to be part of that conversation, I'd love to hear from you.