Plain-English automation for transaction coordinators

The idea

Transaction coordinators run 10 to 30 concurrent files, and every file is the same deadline chain wearing a different address: option period, inspection objection, appraisal, financing contingency, clear-to-close. Miss one and someone loses earnest money. The market has already voted that automation is worth paying for — n8n Cloud charges $27/mo for the generic version — but a TC is never going to wire up a node graph, and the horizontal tools have no idea what a financing contingency is.

The wedge is vertical templates plus plain-English input. Paste the contract dates (or the contract itself) and a state-specific milestone chain arms itself, complete with the emails to agents, lenders, and title that TCs currently send by hand from a checklist. The now is that contract parsing was the hard part, and an LLM does it reliably enough to seed a timeline a human confirms in thirty seconds.

Who pays

Independent TCs and small TC companies, who already pay per-file for lesser tools and charge $350-500 per closed file themselves. $49/mo flat for unlimited files is priced against a fraction of one saved mistake. Distribution: TC Facebook groups and communities, state TC associations, and partnerships with TC training courses, which mint new buyers monthly.

MVP scope

• File creation with pasted dates or Claude-parsed purchase agreement upload
• Milestone chain templates for TX, FL, and CA with editable offsets
• Temporal-backed scheduled emails to per-file contacts, sent as the TC
• Mark-done and date-amendment with automatic chain reflow
• Dashboard with at-risk files surfaced first
• Skip for v1: SMS, client portals, e-signature, brokerage-level admin, all other states

Build CloseChain, a contract-to-close automation tool for real estate transaction coordinators. Stack: Next.js (App Router) with Postgres, Claude API for contract parsing, Temporal for durable workflow scheduling, Resend for email.

Core flow: 1) TC creates a File and either pastes the key contract dates or uploads the purchase agreement; Claude extracts effective date, inspection period, appraisal deadline, financing contingency, and closing date. 2) TC picks a state template (start with TX, FL, CA) that maps those dates to a chain of milestones with default reminder offsets — e.g. inspection reminder 2 days before expiry, appraisal follow-up to the lender at day 10. 3) The app shows the full timeline for confirmation, then arms a Temporal workflow per file that fires emails to the right party (buyer agent, listing agent, lender, title) on schedule from the TC's address via Resend. 4) TC can mark milestones done, which cancels pending reminders downstream of that milestone, or amend a date, which reflows the whole chain.

Pages: files dashboard with at-risk flags, file detail timeline, template editor, contact book, email log. Non-obvious details: use Temporal so date amendments reschedule reliably instead of cron-scanning; compute business-day vs calendar-day deadlines per state rules, since Texas option periods count calendar days but some contingencies do not. Pricing: $49/mo flat, unlimited files, 14-day trial.