Amy Newcomb is a natural when it comes to juggling multiple tasks at once — which really pays off in her current role with the Andy Bovender Team in Charlotte, NC.
Or should we say, four roles.
That’s right. Not only is Amy absolutely crushing it as the team’s operations manager and listing manager, she’s also the backup closing manager/transaction coordinator, and leasing coordinator for the property management side of the business.
“I do a little bit of everything,” she says. “It’s just one of those roles where you wind up doing anything and everything that comes your way…and I think that’s why I like being in this real estate admin role so much, no two days are the same.”
The Bovender Team is one of Compass’ Founding Teams in Charlotte, ranking in the top 5 in NC and SC, and top 1% nationally! With 15 agents on the team and over 400 families assisted annually, it’s safe to say that Amy has had a lot on her hands. (And honestly? 👏🏻)
In this interview, Amy reveals the tools and processes she uses to stay on top of a highly varied task load, keep agents and clients aligned, and amplify her team’s incredible culture of support.
Inside this interview:
- The many hats of a real estate systems linchpin
- Transaction coordination software that supports you
- A team that feels like family
Ready to streamline communication between your agents, clients, and TCs? With Preclose GO!, your entire team can communicate via chat, text, and email with buyers, sellers, and any other parties involved in the transaction.
The many hats of a real estate systems linchpin
Amy got her real estate license in North and South Carolina while she was still in college. After graduating, she transitioned to loan origination for a few years, but ultimately decided that the real estate side of the business was where she wanted to be.
Luckily, Amy’s vast experience also spanned mortgage processing and underwriting, backhouse management, and even helping agents with their taxes. Today, she’s brought that wide range of talents to the Bovender Team — and fortunately, she doesn’t have to fly solo.
“We do have two closing managers on the team, and she takes most of our closings because that’s what I was originally hired to do was to take her overflow,” Amy explains. “I’ve been doing around 130 closings per year, but that’s just the overflow because she’s doing 200+!”
While Amy was on maternity leave, the team decided to switch their CRM platform. This systems switch-up wasn’t much of an issue for the team’s other closing manager.
But for Amy, it was.
“When I came back from maternity leave, I said, ‘If I’m going to be doing 20+ closings each month, I would prefer to work out of transaction management software,’” she explains. “I’m not old school. I don’t write everything down. I’d much rather have it in a computer system.”
Fortunately for Amy, her team leader Andy Bovender was on the same paperless page.
He put Amy to the task of finding the perfect platform, and her search brought her to Preclose GO!.
“I started a spreadsheet and got trials to all kinds of different transaction management programs,” she says.
“I just liked the Preclose interface. I thought it was easy to use. I liked how it was customizable between the intake form and the transaction templates. I liked that I could email out of it. Most importantly, I liked that when I emailed out of it, it wasn’t coming from some other email address. It was coming from mine.”
Getting agents on board with change (in just 3 weeks)
Of course, choosing a system is just the beginning. Amy also needed to sync up with the agents on the team and get them on board as well.
“For about four weeks, I would enter things in myself whenever a new closing would come in,” she says. “I’d get all the information and then I would share that with the agents I was working with so they could have access to it if they wanted to.”
The main goal at this point was just to get the word ‘Preclose’ in front of them and get them familiar with the closing emails.
“We really didn’t roll it out to everybody for maybe a month after I had been using it,” Amy says. “The team leader and I wanted to work out any kinks and ask any questions to try to get clarity before we rolled it out to the whole team.”
Streamline communication and collaboration between agents, TCs, and clients in Preclose.
But once they did roll it out, they were able to hit the ground running. They gave the agents time to get familiar with the platform, with the goal of having all closings entered in Preclose within three weeks.
“I trained everybody on how to use it,” Amy explains. “I sent out Loom videos and lots of emails. I was in the office every day for questions.”
The process went swimmingly.
“Honestly, [agent onboarding] really wasn’t that bad because we’re a team that embraces change,” she says. “The agents know how to use it, they know what the deal is, and it really has made turning in a sale very simple.”
For her, the fact that Preclose frees up the agent’s time (rather than take up more of it) definitely helps.
“They put the contacts in there, they put the documents in there — it’s a one-stop shop. They don’t have to go to multiple programs and enter everything in anymore.”
Amy explains how she got her agents on board with her new transaction coordination system in just three weeks.
Transaction coordination software that works the way you need it to
Amy’s agents aren’t the only ones saving hours of time each month.
“Every day, I live and breathe the checklist and the tasks that I have to do,” says Amy. “We have the transaction templates we set up, all the checklist items, the documents that you have to upload, the dates, and the milestones. So if anybody has a question as to what’s happening when, I just go to Preclose.”
This firm step into better transaction visibility has made a huge difference in the number of interruptions — and the amount of time she spends responding to those interruptions — in Amy’s day-to-day workflow.
“It’s a huge thing for me because I’ll have people call me randomly and ask, ‘What leases are expiring in July? How many closings does this person have in October? Where do leads need to be assigned? And because I have all these different Smart Views set up, I have exactly what I need to answer those questions.”
When Amy needs to quickly retrieve an answer, she simply clicks into a specific transaction and all the details are instantly laid out for her.
“It’s very easy for me as an operations manager to go in there and track every agent, their business, their closings, and be able to answer quick questions about due diligence and dates and what’s coming up. Having a checklist helps me make sure things don’t fall through the cracks.”
Everyone works differently, and with Smart Views, you can customize your transaction coordination workspace to work just the way you need it to.
It’s the little things
When asked about her favorite Preclose feature, Amy said, “You’re going to laugh at me.”
(First off, we would never. 😉)
But really, what feature saves her day, every day?
“It’s Preclose’s @tokens and the email, 100%,” she says.
“I’m constantly in a rush,” she explains. “I manage so many different types of transactions that there is no way that I can remember every single client’s name or every address that I’m working on.”
With so many demands on her plate, the little things add up quickly — but they can also make a big difference.
“The @tokens just save me so much time, they save me from calling somebody the wrong name. I have these email templates set up like, ‘You’re scheduled for this inspection at this time with this person, here’s their phone number, here’s their email address, reach out to them for payment,’ it’s just so much easier.”
And lots of details = lots of opportunities for error. 😬
But with Preclose, Amy doesn’t have to sweat the small stuff.
With @tokens, you can automatically pull information from a transaction into your email templates, easy peasy.
“Preclose just puts everything in there for me and it’s super fast,” she says. “It is by far my favorite feature because it saves me so much time.”
Here’s Amy on how she keeps everything organized (and everyone in the loop!) throughout the transaction process.
Security clients can trust
Preclose has also provided some big benefits on the client side of the transaction.
“We give clients access to all of the dates and the documentation so they can log in and get all that information if they have to,” says Amy. “That has cut down on people reaching out to us saying, ‘Hey, can you send me a copy of this? I can’t find it.’”
With direct messaging in Preclose, clients also have a secure way to send sensitive information.
“When they have to send things with their social security number on it and the attorney doesn’t have a secure portal or email system, I’ll have them send a direct message and they can upload their sensitive information to the chat. Then I can just send it within the Preclose portal to the attorney or the paralegal,” Amy explains.
In Preclose GO!, clients can securely upload documents and communicate seamlessly with their agent and transaction coordinator — whether via email or chat!
Support you can count on
When it comes to transaction management tools, this isn’t Amy’s first rodeo.
“I know a lot of transaction management companies, and they don’t have great support,” she says. “If you reach out to them, you might hear back two weeks later. Nothing ever really gets changed.”
But Preclose support is “completely different.”
“I’ve brought them multiple things that we would like the system to do, and they’ve been able to implement them. They’ve found workarounds for us,” she says. “It’s a great support system.”
Psst! Did you know we also have a Facebook Mastermind? Preclose users can join the discussion any time and get advice from some seriously productive TCs.
A team that feels like family
By now, you can probably tell that Amy and the Bovender team take the concept of support seriously.
“Culture is a huge thing on our team,” Amy says. “We call ourselves a family, and we very much are a family. It’s the type of environment where we are so supportive and so helpful to one another that people move away and they still want to work on the team.”
For her, it’s just about trust and reciprocity.
“We want each other to succeed to the point where we feed off of each other. When someone helps you succeed on a deal or in a certain area, you want to pay it back and help the other person,” she explains.
“On this team, you respect and love the people you work with, so you will put in as much effort as you can because you want everybody else on the team to succeed. You want them to be happy. So I would say that is very much our culture — supportive, respectful, helpful, whatever we can do.”
