Go Paperless, With Eyes Wide Open to Security By Bernice Ross
Are you tired of having to run back to the office to pick up a paper version of your contracts? Have you ever lost out on a multiple offer because the other agent’s clients were signing on an iPad, and you had to drive across town to obtain a signature? If so, it’s time to make the shift to going paperless. Managing the paper version of a real estate transaction has become a nightmare. If you’re holding an open house, for example, you must be prepared to take a listing or write an offer on the spot. In order to be prepared, you must keep the agency disclosures, purchase contracts, listing agreements, property disclosures, plus any other required documents with you at all times.
Complicating matters even further, many states require agents to track 100 or more items to close a single transaction. In the paper world, each of these items begins with the agent filling out the client’s name, address and other contact information. This also means that the agent has to physically deliver the documents for signature or that the clients must print out the documents on their own printer. It’s a huge hassle for everyone. When a buyer’s agent makes a paper copy of a digital document and faxes it, she destroys the digital tracking embedded as “metadata.”
Advantages of Paperless A California agent described the advantages of going paperless in REALTOR Review ®
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the following way: “By going paperless, I’ve cut my workload by 80 percent. Rather than filling out 92 different forms by hand, I enter my clients’ names into our system once, and it populates all the forms with the appropriate contact information.” Another agent shared how going paperless helped her in a multipleoffer situation. She was competing against three other agents. Once the seller issued the counter offer, she sent it to her buyer, who was on a flight from Los Angeles to Chicago. Her buyer signed the counteroffer using DocuSign. She finalized the deal in less than 10 minutes. The other two agents barely had time to contact their clients to arrange a meeting.