How a nine-agent New Jersey team got its deals out of one person's head.

The Challenge

She built the system. Then she became the system.

New Jersey is an attorney state, so there are attorneys on both sides of every deal and more paperwork than most markets. The attorneys do the legal review. Heather's job is to get the right document to the right person on time across 45 files at once, and to do it she watches every email and text moving between the clients, the agents, and the attorneys. Getting all of that out on time is a legal requirement, and it is also how the team delivers the service it wants every client to have.

Heather is the one who built the process. When she joined about six years ago there was no set system, so she wrote a task list for every stage of a listing and every stage of a buyer file. “I'm a big checklist person,” she said. “That's the only way I can keep things straight.” What she could not find was one place to keep it. So the system lived in four. The task list was in a Google spreadsheet. The email templates were in Google Docs on the shared drive. The deal details were in a transaction ledger. And Heather kept a notebook with a page per transaction, the cliff notes, so she would not have to open all three to answer one question.

It held together because she remembered the rest. Every change made that harder: a new date or a changed term had to be repeated in the notebook, in Slack, over email, and in the spreadsheet so that everyone knew. The knowledge that ran nine agents' deals lived in one person's memory, and time off was hard to take.

The team worked through Sisu, Dotloop, and KW Command along the way. Each one gave her a cleaner task list than the spreadsheet, and none of them could send the templated emails her process ran on. “I keep saying, how am I the only person that is saying this needs to happen?” she said. “We need one platform that could do all this.”

The Solution

Three things moved out of her head and into the file.

“The first time I uploaded a contract and saw everything that Ava was doing, I was like, how is this gonna work? Because it seems too easy almost.”

Ava pulls the details in. When an agent Slacks her a new address, Heather gives Ava the listing agreement and Ava reads the parties and the dates into the file. The paperwork that arrives later goes the same way, so nobody forwards an email for someone else to retype into the ledger. “She's pulling all the information,” Heather said. “I don't have to pull it, I don't have to duplicate it, I don't have to send it to a global partner so they can put it on the ledger so I can add it in my email.”

Heather and her partners see the same tasks. Three to four admins work from one shared task list per file, about 150 tasks long, and each of them checks off their own work in the same place. “I don't have to look and see, did they send out the newsletter for Thursday? I'll just look and see if it's checked off. They've done it.” The agents stay out of it by design, as Pollock Properties Group is also an Agent Services team, and still get their listings live and their buyers to closing.

Ava drafts the emails, Heather checks and sends. A single listing takes 25 to 30 templated emails. Each one used to mean opening the template on the drive, pasting it into Gmail, and typing in every seller name, date, and attorney detail by hand, five to ten minutes at a time. “If I sent out 20 emails at ten each, 200 minutes,” Heather said. “Three hours, roughly.” She puts the same set at under 30 minutes now. “I can just drop and drag my task into the box and say, please draft this, and go and do something else, and come back and just double check that everything's correct and send it out.”

Ava also watches her inbox, which matters most when Heather is out of town. Her global partners can see what came in and send the right response from ListedKit without signing into her Gmail and passing two-factor codes back and forth. The process is something the team can read now, not something only Heather knows.