I've been in real estate for almost thirty years. I've made a lot of mistakes, closed a lot of deals, and learned most of what I know the hard way. But there's one person who probably kept me from washing out in year one, and until now I've never really said that out loud.
Her name was Tracy. She was a transaction coordinator.
Year One Almost Broke Me
When I got my license, I was hungry but clueless. I knew how to talk to people, I knew my market, and I had no idea what happened after a contract was signed. The paperwork, the timelines, the contingencies, the phone calls to escrow — it was like a foreign language I hadn't studied for. I was dropping balls I didn't even know were in the air. A deal nearly fell apart because I missed a deadline. Not because I was lazy. Because I genuinely didn't have a system. I didn't even know I needed one.
Tracy saved that deal. And then she sat me down and explained, calmly and without making me feel like an idiot, exactly what had to happen and when and why. She had a checklist. She had a timeline. She had a way of tracking every moving piece of a transaction that made the whole thing feel manageable instead of chaotic. I remember thinking, how does she hold all of this in her head? The answer, I eventually understood, was that she didn't hold it in her head. She built systems so she didn't have to.
What Tracy Actually Taught Me
Working alongside Tracy, I started to see transaction coordination differently. It wasn't administrative support. It wasn't just paperwork wrangling. It was risk management. Every checklist item she tracked was a potential lawsuit or a lost deal or a client relationship that didn't survive closing. Her systems weren't busywork — they were the invisible structure that let a transaction actually close. She was calm when agents were panicking because she already knew what came next. She'd built a process that told her. I watched her handle four transactions at once with a clarity I found almost unnerving. I started asking her questions. A lot of them. She answered every single one.
I carried those lessons with me through the next three decades. Every system I ever built, every checklist I ever made, every time I slowed down to think about process instead of just reacting — that came from watching Tracy work. When I decided in early 2026 to build a software tool for transaction coordination using AI, I knew immediately what I wanted to call it. Not because it was clever. Because it was honest. Traicee is named after her. It's spelled differently so it could work as a brand, but every time I say the name I'm thinking about the woman who showed me that doing this job right takes real skill and real discipline.
What This Means If You're a TC or an Agent
I built Traicee as a solo founder, no development team, no venture money, just me and a lot of AI tools and late nights figuring it out as I went. I'm a broker, not a software engineer. But I built it from the perspective of someone who has watched exceptional TCs work up close and spent years trying to replicate their thinking in my own practice. I have a lot of respect for what this job actually requires, and I don't think that respect is common enough in conversations about real estate technology.
Traicee exists to support TCs and the agents who work with them — to make the systems side of this business a little less manual and a little more consistent, without replacing the judgment and relationships that make a great TC irreplaceable. Tracy wasn't replaceable. The right tools just would have given her more time to do the parts of the job that actually required her. That's what I'm trying to build here.
A Note to Tracy, Wherever You Are
I don't know if you'll ever see this. But if you do — thank you. You have no idea how much of what I built over thirty years started with you showing me how to think about process. The software is named after you. I hope that counts for something.
If this story resonates with you — whether you're a TC who's built systems like Tracy did or an agent who finally gets why those systems matter — I'd love for you to take a look at what Traicee can do. It was made with people like you in mind.