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Six contracts came in overnight. They were done by 2PM the next day.
How a 23-agent team that competes on service cut contract intake in half with Ava, and stopped trusting a spreadsheet to know what the contract actually said.
A team built on service
Five years ago, SCH Real Estate was Carrie Hensley's husband and two agents. Today it is 23 agents with seven people supporting them, a power brand within Realty Executives Associates, with their own brokerage that opened last August. Carrie runs the operations side alongside two transaction coordinators, the broker, and the marketing, accounting, and insurance staff.
The way they compete is not complicated. “Our motto is no sales, just service,” Carrie says, and the team runs the business accordingly.
“We have probably a lot more touch points and a lot more communication pieces than most TCs or even agents do. We follow up with the lender three to five times throughout the contract. Same thing with title. We send the listing agent and our sellers and our buyers lots of information throughout the contract so they don't feel like they're just waiting in limbo.”
Emails start going out seven days before closing. That level of service is the product, and it is also the part that gets expensive when the back office cannot keep up.
Before ListedKit
A really well laid out Excel sheet.
The team averages 40 to 60 active contracts. They count every Wednesday. One week this summer they were at 58, and in June they closed 63.
All of it ran through software Carrie chooses not to name, and describes plainly. “It was great. It was a really advanced Excel sheet, basically. So great for tasks and checking boxes and those kinds of things. But it was losing a lot of the extra pieces that could really help us.”
Intake was the first tax. An agent would submit a Google form, and then someone had to work the contract from scratch. “It would probably take us anywhere from an hour to two hours to work that first contract.” Carrie is fast at it, and she is honest about why. “I got really good because I'm good at Excel sheets. I love Excel sheets, and I could get it into an Excel sheet within 15 minutes.” For a newer coordinator, just keying the dates into the template could take 30 minutes on its own. Then came checking the purchase and sale agreement, the addenda, the amendments, and every signature, followed by the welcome calls and the emails to the buyer, the listing agent, the lender, and title.
Then came the weekends. “Some weekends, we were getting 15 contracts. So coming in on Monday was just chaos. Me and our broker were having to jump in and work contracts and trying to put everything in. And it was a lot.”
The second tax was change. When a closing date moved, somebody had to walk every dependent task forward by hand. “That was something we really struggled with in our Excel program, that when we had to change the closing date, someone would forget to change all the different tasks that were associated with closing. There were definitely some things that got missed right there.”
The one that almost went badly
The sheet said ten days. The contract said five.
One file is the one Carrie comes back to.
“We thought it was a 10 day inspection period because our very standard time is 10 days. And the agent had put five. And so we had put in our Excel sheet for it to be a 10 day. And so then when it had already come and passed, the agent was freaking out because they didn't do their inspection in time. It was a whole big mess.”
It ended fine. The house had no real problems, and the listing agent let them inspect after the deadline anyway. “But it could have gone very south very quickly.”
That is the biggest risk of a careful manual system. Nobody was careless, but the sheet did not know what the contract actually said.
Skeptical of AI
“I'm not very trusting of AI.”
This is worth saying plainly, because it is the most useful part of this story for anyone weighing the same decision. “I'm not very trusting of AI in a lot of aspects of it,” Carrie says.
Her husband was the one pushing. He had come across a video about ListedKit on YouTube, then found a second person talking about it, and the fact that two independent sources landed in the same place got his attention. His argument was never about features. “Anytime that you can get back in real estate is money in your pocket. And that's something that my husband talks about all the time.”
The team was not starting from zero on AI. They already used ChatGPT for newsletters and client communication, and Carrie describes her admin team as very with the times. Automating the emails was the priority, and everything else was going to be a perk.
What is actually different about Ava
It fills in the information. You do not even need templates.
Carrie has the sharpest explanation of this we have heard from a customer, and it is worth quoting at length.
“The automated emails that you could use for some of the other programs, it's much more you put in your templates and then it just sends the template and doesn't always check the information. Ava's able to plug in the information. So, like due dates, timelines, information. So as long as she has the information and you want to share that with someone, you can tell her that and she shares it out. So commission percentage, contingencies, inspection due dates, closing timeline, those kinds of things.”
Then came the part that surprises people.
“You don't even have to have your own templates in there. If you just give her an idea of what you want the email to say and what information you want to share, she'll draft up the email and it sounds super professional. It's well laid out. So it's a lot less off of your plate on trying to create the template beforehand and then trying to make sure it gets automated.”
What changed
From an advanced checklist to a coordinator that reads the file.
“We've gotten six contracts in the last 24 hours. They knocked them out. They were done by two o'clock yesterday. That was the best part of it, that usually that would have taken them all day yesterday, and they got done with it within two hours.”
The Results
New contracts worked in about two hours, instead of a full day
30 min, max
Contract intake, down from one to two hours, with the emails sent
40 to 60
Active contracts at a time, supporting 23 agents
Intake dropped to 30 minutes.
“My admin team absolutely loves it and raves about it. And they're like, man, this takes me 30 minutes, max. And she sent all the emails out for me.” Carrie's summary: “It's cut in half, if not more, for every time we do a contract.”
A closing date change is one message.
“Please, Ava, can you change the closing date to whatever date it is and make sure all tasks are updated.” Ava updates the dependent task due dates so nobody has to walk the timeline by hand. On the experience of working that way: “It's like talking to a human. It's just easy chatting.”
Ava catches what people miss.
Ava flags contingencies and terms buried where nobody was looking. “Sometimes as humans, we overlook that. And so she can bring some of those pieces into the contract that we may have not seen. So, like closing costs, for example, if they didn't put it in special steps, but they put it on the line above.”
Carrie's favorite example is the turn of the calendar year. “Some of our agents, especially in the January, February time frame, forget that the new year has started. And so, you know, putting 2025 instead of 2026, her catching that, I need to do an amendment.”
Agents can see where their own files stand.
This is the change Carrie did not expect. The old system was never agent facing. “The agents never saw any of that, and so they didn't realize how much actually went into our contracts.”
Now every agent is added to their own contracts and can see the completion percentage. “Our agents are able to see, oh, wow, okay, we've completed most of the tasks. Or, oh, wow, this doesn't look like, you know, we're supposed to be halfway through this contract and we're only at 30. Why is that?”
The result is fewer phone calls to the admin team and more agents closing their own loops. “Some of our agents are very hands off. And this has actually been pushing them to be a little bit more hands in.”
She is candid that agent adoption is still in progress. Several agents are more comfortable on a computer than texting Ava, so the team brought ListedKit into an agent meeting to walk through the why, and it is moving.
One word for Ava
She could not manage one word.
We asked Carrie to describe Ava in a single word, and she could not manage it.
“My best friend,” she said. When told that was two words, she negotiated. “We'll call it bestie. Yeah, my bestie, my bestie, for sure. She's definitely been a saving grace these last few months.”
Then she found the better answer. “She's just a Swiss Army knife. She really can do a lot of things that I never even thought I could do.”
“I really do feel like I don't know if we can go back. I don't know if I can go back to a checklist kind of thing.”
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Questions
How long does contract intake take with ListedKit?
Can a small admin team keep up with 40 to 60 active contracts?
What happens when a closing date changes?
How is Ava different from email templates in other transaction software?
Can agents see the status of their own transactions?
How much does ListedKit cost?
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Running 40, 50, 60 files on a system that only works because your people are careful?
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