Setting up your closing playbook

Playbooks are your brokerage's operating models for a closing — the milestones, tasks, timings, and owners written down once. Every new closing starts from one of them, so nobody has to rebuild the process from memory.

The Playbooks page with tabs for Default playbook on the buy side and sell side, plus an Add playbook control — Playbooks — one default for buy side, one for sell side, and room to add more.

Two defaults, one per side

The closing playbooks live at Config → Playbooks → Closing playbooks (the lead and deal playbooks have pages of their own beside it). You arrive with two ready-made playbooks:

Default playbook · Buy — the process when you represent the buyers: financing, appraisal, inspection response, and the rest of the buyer-side chain.
Default playbook · Sell — the process when you represent the sellers: disclosures, repair negotiation, payoff, and proceeds.

The two defaults are written for your state. The state you gave during onboarding picks the pair — Default playbook — Texas, say — with that state's contract form, contingency calendar, and disclosure steps already in the milestones and tasks; every US state and DC has one. Change the state during onboarding and the defaults are swapped in place. Outside the US you get a generic pair to shape from.

When a closing opens, its side's default playbook is copied onto it as a live milestone chain. Editing a playbook only changes future closings — each transaction owns its own copy from the moment it's created.

Add playbooks for other transaction types

A side can carry more than one playbook. Use Add playbook when you have a typical process that isn't the default — cash purchases, new construction, short sales, a different state's contingency calendar. Give it a name and a short "when to use" description so your team can tell them apart.

The playbook whose name starts with Default is what new closings get automatically for that side. Extra playbooks are there when you choose: when you drop a contract into a thread (or open a closing by hand), you can pick the matching playbook instead of the default.

What each playbook holds

Milestones in order

Each playbook is an ordered list of milestones — the circles on a live closing. Reorder with the arrows, rename inline, and use Add milestone when a step is missing. Timings are counted from the contract or closing date (for example, 10 days after contract date).

Default tasks under each milestone

Every milestone carries the to-dos that land, unticked, on a new closing. Each task says who does it — Deal owner, Client, External party, or AI (the AI Transaction Coordinator) — and whether it's Internal only or Client visible. For an AI task, the multi-line detail is the coordinator's runbook: put your house rules there. The first task on every playbook is the coordinator's — read the executed contract, extract the key terms, and set the deadlines. See Meet your AI coordinator.

Client-facing wording

Milestones and tasks that clients can see get plain-English labels and notes. Internally a step can read "Contract executed"; to the client it reads warmer and clearer.

Customize on the transaction, not the template

The playbook is a starting point. Once a closing exists, every milestone and task on its detail page can be renamed, re-dated, added, or waived for that transaction alone — the template and every other closing stay untouched. Change the playbook when the pattern is permanent; change the closing when the deal is just being a deal. See Tracking closings.

Let the assistant shape the playbook with you

You don't have to fill in the tables by hand. Use Edit with AI on the Closing playbooks page — or the setup task for defining your closing process — and describe how your brokerage works. The assistant renames milestones, moves timings, sets audiences, and writes the client-facing lines. You can also ask later: "add a title-review step ten days after contract, internal only."

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