I have discovered a fascinating phenomenon in real estate: every transaction is an emergency until somebody has to do something.

The buyer needs financing immediately. The seller cannot wait another day. The broker informs me that the entire deal will collapse unless I move mountains before lunch. So I move the mountains.

Then I ask for one missing document. Silence. Apparently, the emergency has been postponed until Thursday.

I've seen deals where everybody was calling everybody three times a day, demanding updates, threatening deadlines, and generally behaving as if we were trying to evacuate a burning building. Then somebody needs to sign a two-page document, and suddenly we're all on vacation.

It's a remarkable system. Your delay is a catastrophe. My delay is an administrative detail.

And I can't pretend lenders are innocent. We can demand a mountain of paperwork by Friday, then spend the following week reviewing it. When the borrower asks what's happening, we explain that these things take time. Funny how time becomes precious or abundant depending on whose desk the file is sitting on.

Of course, some deadlines are real. Rate locks expire. Purchase contracts have closing dates. Sellers have obligations, buyers have moving arrangements, and delays can cost serious money. But that makes the fake emergencies even more irritating. If everything is urgent, nothing is. And when the genuinely urgent problem finally arrives, everybody has already developed a healthy immunity to panic.

Maybe the solution isn't to move faster. Maybe it's to stop confusing urgency with importance, and to distinguish an actual deadline from somebody trying to make his problem the center of everybody else's universe.

I've started thinking that one of the most valuable people in any transaction is the one who simply says what he needs, when he needs it, and why. No drama. No theatrical countdown. No phone call announcing that the previous phone call was extremely important. Just a date, a document, and somebody who actually follows through.

So here's my question: how much time do we really lose to complicated transactions, and how much do we lose because everybody demands immediate action from everyone except themselves?