In brief
This is a standard operating procedure for a residential real estate file, from ratified contract to archived close-out, in five stages: open the file, work the contingency window, run loan, title, and insurance, close the week, and close out. Every step names three things a checklist leaves out: who owns it, the artifact that proves it happened, and the definition of done. Owners are written as [Agent], [TC], or [Either] so you can assign them to your model, and [Brokerage Policy] marks the places your office’s rules decide the answer. It is drawn from the same work as the library’s transaction checklist and TC guide, so it will not contradict them. Adapt it to your brokerage and your state, keep contractual notices on the forms your contract and state require, and treat it as an operating aid, not legal advice.
Most transaction checklists share one blind spot. They record what to do and stay silent on the two questions that decide whether a file survives an audit: who was responsible, and what proof exists that the work happened. A standard operating procedure answers both. This page is that procedure for a residential transaction, written so a team can adopt it as written, assign the owners to fit how they actually run files, and measure a live file against it.
The structure is deliberately dull, because dull is what survives contact with a busy pipeline. Five stages, in the order a file experiences them. Each stage is a table of steps, and each step carries four columns: the step itself, the owner in brackets, the verification artifact that lands in the file, and the definition of done. Read the artifact column as the real specification. It is the difference between “we ordered title” and “the commitment is in the file with its receipt date,” which is the difference between a task and a proof.
Open the file
Ratification is the starting gun, and almost every later deadline counts from it. The first pass turns a signed contract into an open, dated, distributed file.
| Step | Owner | Verification artifact | Definition of done |
|---|---|---|---|
| Verify the contract is fully executed — every page, initial, counter, and addendum incorporated. | [Either] | The complete executed contract in the file. | No blank left open, no missing initial, every counter and addendum folded in. |
| Fix the effective date and the contract's definition of a day. | [Either] | A dated note recording the effective date and the form's counting convention, traceable to the paragraph that sets it. | The date every other deadline counts from is written down, not remembered. |
| Open the file and introduce every party in one thread.[Brokerage Policy] Your brokerage sets the file-open system and the naming convention for the file. | [TC] | The introduction message naming buyer, seller, co-op agent, lender, and settlement or title, with the closing date and who is coordinating. | One thread exists that every party is on. |
| Build the timeline from the contract. | [Either] | A dated deadline sheet, each date traceable to a contract paragraph and shared with the agent. | Every contractual date is calendared, counted the form's way, with a reminder set before it. |
| Confirm the earnest money was delivered and receipted.[Brokerage Policy] Who holds the deposit, and how delivery is confirmed, is set by your brokerage and the contract. | [TC] | The deposit receipt from the named holder, filed and dated inside the delivery window. | Proof of delivery is in the file, not a verbal report that it was sent. |
| File the agency and intake paperwork your brokerage requires at open.[Brokerage Policy] Which intake forms are required, and when the first file review happens, is brokerage policy. | [Agent] | The signed agency disclosure and any brokerage intake forms. | The open-file forms your office requires are signed and filed. |
| Send the client the first note. | [Agent] | A saved welcome message stating the closing date and the next step. | The client knows the date, what happens next, and what you need from them and when. |
Contingency window
Disclosures and the inspection open their own clocks, and several run from a delivery date rather than from ratification. This is where a right gets preserved or quietly waived.
| Step | Owner | Verification artifact | Definition of done |
|---|---|---|---|
| Deliver, or confirm receipt of, the seller's disclosures, and record the delivery date. | [Either] | Dated proof of delivery, or the buyer's dated receipt. | Each disclosure is delivered, or its receipt confirmed, the way the contract requires, and the delivery date is recorded, because some clocks run from it. |
| Deliver, or confirm receipt of, the seller's lead-based-paint disclosure and pamphlet for any home built before 1978. | [Either] | The signed lead-based-paint disclosure in the file. | For pre-1978 housing, the seller's federal lead-based-paint disclosure is signed and in the file before the buyer is obligated. |
| Order, or confirm the order of, the HOA, condo, or association package the day the contract ratifies, and deliver it or confirm its receipt.[Brokerage Policy] Who orders and pays for the resale package can be brokerage or contract driven; on the buyer side this step confirms the order and receipt rather than producing them. | [Either] | The ordered package and dated delivery to, or receipt by, the buyer. | The package is ordered immediately and the buyer's review or cancellation period is started from delivery. |
| Calendar the disclosure review or rescission deadline from its trigger. | [TC] | The deadline on the calendar with the delivery date it runs from. | The review or cancellation deadline is tracked from delivery, not from ratification. |
| Schedule the inspection early in the window and order any specialty inspections. | [Either] | The inspection confirmation and any specialty orders. | Inspections are booked with room left to act before the window closes. |
| Route the inspection response before the deadline. | [Agent] | The signed inspection notice or repair addendum, or a dated written decision to proceed. | The buyer's response is in writing and delivered before the window closes; under many forms, silence at expiry can waive the right. |
| Distribute the executed amendment and re-flow the schedule. | [TC] | The fully executed repair or inspection amendment, sent to all parties and the lender. | Every party holds the signed amendment and any new dates are on the calendar. |
| Verify agreed repairs, with paper. | [Either] | Receipts, invoices, or a re-inspection. | The work is confirmed complete, not assumed, well before the walkthrough. |
Loan, title & insurance
The long tracks. Financing, title, and insurance each run on their own timeline, and the contract's clock is not the lender's or the title company's. Start them early and track them in writing.
| Step | Owner | Verification artifact | Definition of done |
|---|---|---|---|
| Confirm the buyer applied and the lender has the ratified contract. | [Either] | Written lender confirmation of application. | Application is confirmed and the lender is working from the executed contract. |
| Open title and settlement. | [TC] | The settlement or escrow file number, and the company's confirmation it has the contract. | The settlement file is open early, while title surprises still have room to cure. |
| Read the title commitment the day it arrives. | [Agent] | The title commitment in the file with its receipt date and review notes on liens, easements, and exceptions. | Anything unexpected is flagged for the client and routed to cure, not left for closing week. |
| Confirm the seller's payoff is ordered and the legal description and vesting match. | [Either] | Written confirmation the payoff is ordered and the vesting matches the parties signing. | The payoff clock is running and the legal description matches the contract. |
| Track the appraisal from order to delivery. | [Either] | Dated lender confirmations of the order and the delivery. | The order date is recorded and expected delivery is tracked against the financing and appraisal deadlines. |
| Deliver any appraisal-gap response before its deadline. | [Agent] | The appraisal-contingency notice the contract requires, dated. | If the value comes in short, the response is delivered on time, the way the contract requires. |
| Track financing milestones against the contract's clock. | [TC] | A dated status trail matched to each financing deadline. | Conditions, conditional approval, and clear-to-close are tracked against the contract's dates, which run on a different clock than the lender's. |
| Bind insurance and get the binder to the lender. | [Either] | The binder or declarations page and the lender's confirmation it satisfies the loan; flood coverage ordered where the property requires it. | Coverage is bound, not merely quoted, and the evidence is with the lender. |
Closing week
The home stretch runs on federal timing and careful confirmation. Nothing new should be created here; everything already done should be getting proven and reconciled.
| Step | Owner | Verification artifact | Definition of done |
|---|---|---|---|
| Confirm the lender's clear-to-close. | [TC] | The written clear-to-close. | Underwriting conditions are satisfied. |
| Confirm the Closing Disclosure reached the buyer in time. | [Either] | Dated confirmation the buyer received the Closing Disclosure. | The buyer received the CD at least three business days before closing, per the federal TRID rule; any change that restarts that clock is flagged. |
| Confirm the brokerage's commission disbursement authorization is with the settlement agent. | [TC] | Written confirmation the settlement office holds the commission disbursement authorization and disbursement instructions. | Commission and disbursement instructions are at settlement before the settlement statement is finalized. |
| Reconcile the settlement figures. | [Either] | The settlement statement reviewed against the contract, credits, and prorations. | Figures are reconciled with the settlement agent, including the repair credit that is easy to forget and, for association properties, the estoppel or association closing figures — dues, transfer fees, and any special assessment — so they land on the statement before the CD is final. |
| Confirm cash-to-close and verify wire instructions by phone. | [Either] | A dated note that wire details were verified by voice on an independently known number. | The buyer previewed the number; wire instructions were confirmed by phone, never from the email that carried them; funds move ahead of need. |
| Schedule the walkthrough and closing and confirm with every party. | [Either] | The confirmed schedule circulated to all parties. | Time and place are confirmed; the walkthrough is set close to closing, with a margin. |
| Walk through against the paperwork. | [Either] | A walkthrough confirmation with the repair receipts and the contract's inclusion list in hand. | Condition, agreed repairs, and included items are checked against the documents, not memory. |
Close-out
The deal is not done until the file is. Funding and recording get confirmed, the client gets closed out, and a complete, audit-ready file goes to the broker.
| Step | Owner | Verification artifact | Definition of done |
|---|---|---|---|
| Confirm funding and recording. | [TC] | The recording confirmation with its date. | The deed and any new loan are recorded; the recording date is noted. |
| Confirm possession and the key handoff — keys, codes, remotes, openers, and warranties — per the contract's possession terms. | [Either] | A dated confirmation of possession and of the key, code, and warranty transfer, with utility transfer arranged for the possession date. | Keys, codes, remotes, and warranties transfer, and utilities are arranged, on the contract's possession date, which is not always the closing date. |
| Collect the final signed set and the settlement statement. | [Either] | The complete executed document set and the final settlement statement in the file. | Every signed document and the final statement are in the file. |
| Reconcile commission or disbursement. | [Either] | The disbursement confirmation. | Disbursement is received and reconciled. |
| Deliver the final documents to the client. | [Agent] | A saved record of delivery to the client. | The client has their closing documents and settlement statement for their records and taxes. |
| Submit the file for compliance review and archive.[Brokerage Policy] The compliance checklist itself, and the deadline to submit the file, are set by your broker. | [Either] | The complete file handed to the broker for compliance review. | The broker's compliance checklist is satisfied and the file is archived audit-ready. |
| Verify the archived file is complete. | [TC] | A final completeness check against the required-document list. | Every required document is present, signed, and dated; the file could go to an auditor without adding a page. |
Windows, notice mechanics, and remedies vary by state, by form, and by the language of the governing contract; the descriptions above are the shape of each step, not its exact setting on your deal. The two requirements stated without a hedge are federal: the Closing Disclosure must reach the borrower at least three business days before closing under the TRID rule, and the lead-based-paint disclosure is required for housing built before 1978.
Adapting it: what changes, what must not
The same procedure runs three common ways. What moves between them is who owns each step and which policy slots get filled. What holds constant is the part that makes it an SOP rather than a wish list.
Solo agent, no coordinator. Every [TC] and [Either] row collapses onto one person, who is both the doer and the auditor of their own file. This is the hardest version, because there is no second set of eyes to notice a missing artifact. The discipline that saves it is treating the artifact column as non-negotiable: you are allowed to be your own coordinator, but not to skip the proof. What the role of a coordinator really buys is covered in what a transaction coordinator does.
Team with a TC. This is the split the SOP is drawn for. The agent keeps the licensed work, the decisions and negotiation and advice, and the coordinator owns the file: the deadlines, the documents, the hand-offs, and the artifacts. Moving an owner here is fine and expected. What must not move is the boundary underneath it: in most states a coordinator can communicate, schedule, assemble, track, and remind, but deciding, negotiating, and advising stay with the licensee, and that line is set by your state’s license law and your broker, not by which arrangement is convenient.
Brokerage operations desk. One coordination desk runs many agents’ files. Here the [Brokerage Policy] slots stop being personal habits and become house standards, filled once and centrally: who holds the earnest money, when the first file review happens, the naming convention, the compliance checklist and its submission deadline. The payoff is that any file audits the same way regardless of which agent it belongs to. What must not vary across the desk is the artifact standard, because uniform proof is the whole point of centralizing. How brokers build operations around exactly this is the subject of broker compliance and the transaction file.
Buyer side vs. listing side. The owner brackets abstract who on your team does a step (agent, coordinator, or either), not which side of the deal you represent. A few contingency-window steps read from the delivering side: on the buyer side, delivering the seller’s disclosures becomes confirming receipt and recording the delivery date, and the lead-based-paint disclosure stays the seller’s obligation you confirm rather than produce. The verb changes; the artifact and the recorded delivery date do not.
Across all three, four things never bend: the artifact requirement, counting every deadline from the contract itself, the line between coordination and licensed activity, and the by-phone wire verification. Assign the rest to fit your office.
The manual version of work software can now do
Read back over the stages and notice how much of the procedure is reading. Extracting the dates and their counting convention, calendaring them, re-reading an amendment to catch the date it moved, checking a file against the required-document list: the mechanical reading is most of the hours, and it is the part that degrades first when a pipeline gets busy. The artifacts stop landing not because anyone decided to skip them but because no one had time to re-read the file that day.
That reading is what Ratifyly was built to carry. You forward the paperwork the way you would send it to a coordinator, and it reads every page, extracts the parties, the price, and every date with its counting convention, and builds the transaction and its timeline from the documents themselves. When an amendment lands, it re-reads the file and re-flows the schedule; it audits the file against compliance rules; every party watches one shared live timeline; and deadlines escalate before they hit. A human approves every call, because the judgment was never the software’s to own. It is in honest early access. This SOP is the manual version of the first step; the how-it-works page shows the rest.
This template is educational and general in nature. It is not legal advice, and the specifics vary by state, by form, and by the language of the governing contract. Adapt it to your brokerage’s policies and your state’s practice before you rely on it, keep every contractual notice on the forms your contract and state require, and have a licensed broker or attorney review anything with legal effect. The two requirements stated here without a hedge are federal: the Closing Disclosure’s three-business-day timing under the CFPB’s TRID rule, and the lead-based-paint disclosure for housing built before 1978.
Questions teams ask
Who should own the file — the agent or the transaction coordinator?
Honestly, it depends on your model, which is why this SOP marks owners in brackets instead of fixing them. On a team with a coordinator, the agent keeps the licensed work (decisions, negotiation, advice) and the TC owns the file's deadlines, documents, and hand-offs. A solo agent owns both roles at once. A brokerage operations desk may split a single step between a central coordinator and the listing agent. What does not move with the model is the standard: whoever owns a step owns producing its artifact. Change the name in the bracket; keep the proof requirement. Where the line between coordination and licensed activity falls is set by your state's license law and your broker, not by preference.
What is a verification artifact?
It is the piece of evidence that proves a step happened: a deposit receipt, an executed addendum, a written lender confirmation, a dated note that a wire was verified by phone. The SOP is built on artifacts because a file is judged on what it contains, not on what anyone remembers doing. A step with no artifact is, for practical purposes, a step that did not happen, because an auditor, a broker, or a court has nothing to look at. Every row in the procedure names the artifact so the file, rather than the memory, carries the proof.
How do we adapt this to our brokerage?
Two passes. First, fill the [Brokerage Policy] slots (who holds the earnest money, when the first file review happens, the naming convention for the file, the compliance checklist and its submission deadline) with your office's actual policy, once, so every file runs the same way. Second, set the owners: assign each [Either] to the agent, the coordinator, or a central desk to match how your files actually run, and confirm the split respects your state's line between coordination and licensed activity. Then add any step your state's forms require that this generic procedure does not. The skeleton is stable; the settings are yours.
Does this replace our brokerage's compliance checklist?
No, and it is not meant to. The compliance checklist belongs to your broker: it is the list of documents and disclosures the brokerage's license requires in every closed file, and it governs. This SOP is the operating procedure around that checklist, the sequence and the owners and the artifacts that get each required document into the file correctly and on time. Run them together: the SOP is how the work happens, and the broker's checklist is the standard the finished file is measured against. If the two ever conflict, the broker's checklist and your state's rules win.
Do we need software to run this SOP?
No. It is designed to run on a calendar, a shared folder, and the discipline to keep both current. That is the manual version, and plenty of good files close that way. What software changes is the reading load: the reason the same steps get skipped on a busy pipeline is that every one of them reduces to re-reading the file, and re-reading is the first thing to go when many files are live at once. Ratifyly is the automated version of that reading. You forward the paperwork, it extracts the parties, the price, and every date with its counting convention, builds the timeline from the documents, and re-flows the schedule when an amendment lands, with a human approving every call. By hand or with help, the artifact standard is the same.