/Independent trade coverage
The trade record for transaction coordinators
Every figure on this site is attributed to a named primary source, dated, and corroborated where vendor data is involved.
Section
The profession itself: credentials, pay, associations, hiring and how coordinators actually run a book of files.
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Both figures are correct. FHFA counts only financed purchases, and cash buyers, who are 26% of transactions and almost never first-timers, never enter its denominator. Which number describes a coordinator's file mix depends on whether the desk takes cash deals.
Census counts 485,000 new houses for sale at the end of June against a sales pace of 628,000 a year. Two thirds of that inventory sits in the South. For a coordinator, a builder with nine months of standing stock is a different client from a seller with a listing.
A coordinator forecasting order volume is really asking one question of each release: does this describe work already done, work already signed, or work not yet contracted. Redfin's weekly pending count answers first, NAR's index answers next, and FHFA's mortgage database answers last, nine months after the fact.
TC Bulletin computed the monthly distribution of purchase originations across eight years of FHFA's National Mortgage Database. The peak month runs about 1.8 times the trough month, and the curve is stable enough across very different rate environments to plan staffing against.
NAR's index of signed contracts, released 18 August, points at the closings a coordinator will be working through September and October. All four regions declined month over month, the West by 4.7%, and Redfin's faster weekly series shows the same pipeline flat rather than recovering.
That is the highest share the brokerage has recorded since 2023, and it is the number that separates a coordinator's file count from their invoice count. No federal series measures contract failure, so this figure has no independent counterweight.
Commissioner Steve Strode's column states plainly that the role 'does not exist in statute or rule' in Oregon. A stakeholder survey closed 10 July, and the agency says it will take the question to the Real Estate Board and may form a work group. In the meantime it has flagged two concrete risks: unwritten confidentiality terms, and coordinators who cross the state's one-business-name rule.
The Real Estate Commission revised Position 20 on 4 August. It names transaction coordinators directly, sets out what an unlicensed one may perform, and says pay contingent on a closing may raise a RESPA problem. The revision tracks HB26-1426, in force since 12 August, which requires a signed written agreement before any brokerage activity.
Three specialist brokers describe the same claim profile: missed deadlines, missing signatures, the wrong version of a contract. One publishes a premium range. The market-size and premium-saving figures circulating alongside them are not sourced at all.
Nobody was covering this profession as a beat. Five sections, one rule: every number names its source and its date.