Are you passing the buck?

Poker is a great game. In the old west, the player next to deal was given a marker, which was often a buckhorn handle knife. After the player dealt, he “passed the buck.”

Now “pass the buck” means shifting responsibility to someone else. In my business, I often see brokers pass the buck when dealing with piles of underwriting documents on real estate portfolios. Generous, service-first, high-relationship people will pass their transaction partners a mess of documents. Typically I see Excel property schedules that are unclear, engineering documents that are not matched to properties, and discrepancies are buried. I know it’s against these brokers’ and account managers’ very nature to pass the buck, so why do they do it?  

The mess moves on

Have you ever had to collect, reconcile, organize and submit underwriting data for a 200 property portfolio? How about a 1,000 property deal? It’s a bear of a job. So the mess just gets moved on. 

The two obvious dangers are that:

  • Covered properties are not clearly established
  • Disclosed documents are not fully analyzed

The Buck Stops Here

Maybe this is your opportunity to off-load onerous tasks. Because a new service does it for you. A few of these tasks are:

  • Clean up the property list and put every property on a map
  • Match every document to the appropriate property
  • Highlight discrepancies between properties and documents
  • Create a complete “disclosed” document list
  • Share the account data with a link

Because it’s pretty fundamental for everyone in the transaction to have organized and up-to-date data. Brokers that want to can now present reconciled underwriting data, not pass the buck. 

And what about those buckhorn knives? Silver dollars replaced them at poker tables which was likely the origin of “buck” as slang for the dollar.

Image courtesy of https://www.pinterest.com/ctznken/saloonpoker-historical/