I’m excited about the momentum and excitement around transaction management. A great product built by some great people got picked up last week and we can’t wait to see what they’ll build together. At the same time, lots and lots of new entrants are driving innovation in the category which is putting healthy pressure on brokers to get moving on picking a transaction management solution to manage the flow of paperwork and deliverables that accompany every transaction. Huzzah to that.

But I’ll be blunt: transaction management is only half the battle. Manage docs, signatures, and some initial deliverables. Set alerts for key deadlines. Store everything in one place. This is all a great start- but for the buyer, it truly is only a start. Let’s unpack a common transaction management task like “remove loan contingency” for a moment. Does reminding your buyer to remove their loan contingency or upload their loan commitment letter help them at all? “Hey Paul, go get your loan sorted.” Or, “Hey Paul, go get your inspections sorted.” Um, okay, but now what? Where do I start? What’s going to be expected of me? What can I do now, when I have X days left on this contingency, that is going to make this transaction go smoothly, or am I just going to be innundated with requests as they come with little to no warning? How can I avoid surprises?

A quick anecdote from my own homebuying experience: gosh the missus and I loved this house. Made an offer. Counteroffer. Signed contract. Credits. And then, the night before closing, we get a call from our attorney:

“Looks like there’s a lien on the title. Yeah. Sewer assessment. Seller’s attorney says he’s not paying. Won’t show up to closing tomorrow.” 

I’m sure that wasn’t a fun phone call for him, but you can imagine how the wife and I felt. Certainly outrage at the seller for trying to pull such a dirty trick at the 11th hour, but that was nothing compared to the confusion. What about this needed to wait until the day before closing to be revealed?*

Turns out a lot of transactions don’t have title run until the last minute for various reasons. We can get into that in another post, but suffice to say that if I’d known it wasn’t something attorneys always do right after a buyer is in contract, I would have happily paid the few hundred bucks to make sure it got run with enough time to negotiate, plan, and rebut without our feet to the fire and a moving van ready to go (and hence the task in Closing Time “Verify title is clear of all liens and assessments,” due nice and early).

“But Paul, that’s your transaction. Such a corner case…most transactions don’t have liens that only show up the night before closing,” you might say.

And yes, you’d be right. And as we built Closing Time, we began to see a lot of transactions. And we started to see a lot of what appeared to be ‘corner cases.’ And then we saw that almost every transaction, in one way or another, is unique. Each one is a snowflake. Different financial circumstances. Different disclosures. Different buyers, borrowers, lenders, and different rules in different states, counties, cities, and developments. The couple who just got married and received cash they’re going to need to document for their lender, who were self-employed for half of last year and own another property out of state. You get the idea.

To summarize: sure, every transaction starts out looking pretty much the same, but 90% of the work a buyer is responsible for just isn’t represented by transaction management systems, and rightly so. If transaction management systems had to incorporate every situation, every snowflake, for every party and for every document in the transaction, they’d be unweidly and unusable yuckware instead of the amazing utilities they are today.

And this is where we see Closing Time making life easier for you, and making life a lot easier for your buyers. A fully customized conceirge that guides your buyer through that 90% they have to manage when they’re buying a house, alongside and integrated with your transaction management platform. And in fact, in the coming weeks we’ll be announcing our first integration with one of the most prevelent transaction management platforms out there- so sending your buyer their plan toward closing will be as easy as clicking a button and letting our technology do the work. So that for each snowflake of a transaction, your buyer can feel confident and informed – and stay on track.

*So how’d my transaction work out? While state law (and our contract) indicates clearly that any assessments (sewer or otherwise) be taken care of by the seller, our seller was intent on nonperformance and dragging the transaction into a court battle, as he felt he agreed on too low a price anyway. Sadly, we wound up settling with him and paid a portion of the assessment to get him to close. Life before Closing Time…

As reported today in AllThingsD, we’ve officially entered public beta with Closing Time: our humble (but hopefully impactful) contribution to the landscape of those fixing real estate.

What is Closing Time, you ask? It’s an application to simplify the process of buying a house – specifically the period after the contract is signed and buyers get innundated with dozens of mission-critical tasks and deliverables. It’s a tool for agents to help their buyers stay on track, on task, and march toward their closing date with confidence. With a few pieces of key information (like contract sign date, escrow closing date, loan contingency date, etc.) Closing Time automatically generates a dynamic, constantly updating checklist for your buyers that’s intuitive easy to use. Agents can check in on a buyer’s progress getting their W-2s together, scheduling inspections, or any other of the many activities necessary to make sure the deal gets done.

But don’t take our word for it – sign up for a free trial account today. Or watch the video above for a quick tour. And keep watching this space!

There has been a lot of discussion lately about the broken state of the real estate industry. Much of the conversation has been centered on technology and how it can help take the complexity and pain out of real estate transactions. As founders of a company which aims to address these very issues, this newfound fervor and industry introspection really strikes a chord with us. Both Paul and I bought our first homes over the past couple years – he in New Jersey, and me in San Francisco. Both of us had very mixed experiences. On the one hand, it was extremely exciting and joyful to search for and acquire the homes where we would build our lives and families (my son was just born this month here in our home!). On the other hand, despite having excellent agents who guided us through the convoluted process of buying a house, we still found ourselves confused and had to make a concerted effort to obtain control and visibility into our transactions. To be entirely clear – this was not the fault of our agents, but rather a lack of useful tools to help us, the buyers, in our process. So we’ve set out to change that for other buyers and their agents and are really excited about the first steps we’ve taken (more about that in a bit).

It feels as if we are on the cusp of some much needed change in the space. The conversations taking place are focusing on what parts of the process can be improved through technological tools. Lots of attention is being paid to paperless transactions and eliminating the incessant back and forth of documents that need review, signing, and compliance verification. And this is a notable problem that really does need solving, as do many of the other problems being discussed. However, ever since buying our homes, we have found ourselves wanting to solve a truly fundamental part of the process: all of that work that has to happen when a buyer goes into contract on their future home.

This is a complex problem and it’s hard to solve, but we feel it’s critical to try because buying a home is an emotional process and the closing process is usually the most stressful and challenging part. Strangely, despite the inroads many companies have made in building tools for other parts of the process (from listing search by companies like Zillow to document management from companies like DocuSign), little has been done to address the workflow for buyers when they are in contract. So we’re building Closing Time to do exactly that. Whereas when we bought our homes, we spent hours with our agents and spouses making checklists, putting reminders in our phones, and generally running around like crazy, we envision a world where Closing Time helps buyers and agents stay on top of everything they need to do in order to successfully acquire the home of their dreams. All while reducing the stress involved, and making it predictable and fun.

The way Closing Time does this is by asking you a series of questions about the property you’re buying – details about the contract (key dates, contingencies, etc.), financing, property type, and so on – and then using that information to construct a tailored checklist of tasks, where the dates and deliverables match your specific transaction. In doing this, our hope is to eliminate surprises and give buyers and agents a reliable and detailed overview of everything that needs to be done before closing. As the transaction progresses, you get automated reminders for the things you need to do and you check off what’s already been done.

I like to think that we’re off to a solid start. We’ve built what we consider to be the key pieces (those described above) and now we’re busy adding functionality that agents and buyers have been telling us will be valuable – from mortgage document management and inspection scheduling to task customization and localization (although we’ve built Closing Time with the San Francisco Bay Area in mind, it should work well in any state that uses escrow agents – we’ll be supporting attorney review states soon).

We’re proud to be amongst so many fine entrepreneurs, agents, buyers, and sellers who all envision a brighter future for the real estate industry. Please join us for the ride and help us shape Closing Time. We’re actively seeking agents and buyers to give it a whirl, so sign up and give us your feedback.