Kicking Those Last Few December Closings into 2015

December closings are often tricky around the holidays.

My December focus, along with packing for our trip to Cuba and closing on our Hawaii house, is basically getting my last December closings sewed up in 2015. I’ve got 6 listings right now that I had initially hoped might close this month, but two have already rolled into January, which is OK. TRID regulations affect a few things but mostly it’s the same as always: last-minute issues popping up that the loan officers should have taken care of at inception and did not. When you’re a Sacramento listing agent like me, these loan problems are out of my control because I represent the seller, not the buyer.

There are some things I can handle with great efficiency, however. For example, yesterday a buyer’s lender required an addendum specifying a small change. I immediately whipped out the document in ZipForms, uploaded it to DocuSign, called my seller and while I had her on the phone walked her through signing the document and then emailed it to the buyer’s agent. I texted the buyer’s agent to let her know we needed the document signed and, in fewer than 15 minutes, the loan processor held the executed document in her grubby little paws.

That means one file will most likely close right away in my December closings, followed by another, leaving two escrows yet to close. The odds of closing over the remaining 7 business days are high enough on the remaining two that I imagine they will close this year, but it’s still nail-biting time. To close, you’ve got to have people on the job who care if it closes, who make it their personal project to close, and finding those kind of people in this day and age of people hating their shit jobs is really difficult.

It makes me think back to when I was an escrow officer in the 1970s. The reason I stood out among the sea of escrow officers is because I invested my time into closing, especially December closings. I studied each file, dotted each I and crossed every T, and often ended up going above and beyond what was expected me of me at that time to close. So many workers meander through workdays; they punch a clock, do a job and go to lunch, and they don’t care whether the work is finished or how many lives their performance affects. It’s just a paycheck.

Some Sacramento Realtors believe if they can flip a transaction into escrow, everybody else will force it to close. It works that way for some agents but that kind of cavalier attitude has never quite settled in with me. If I can interfere, find a way to make it close sooner for the parties involved, that’s what I do. The last few days of this month are often brain aneurysm avoidance days, but I certainly hope to bring my last few December closings in on time.