Electronic Signature and Online Contract Execution for Real Estate

President Bill Clinton signed ESIGN into law in 2000,  and ESIGN with UETA establishes a legal framework based on the principle that electronic records and signatures carry the same weight and legal effect as traditional paper documents and handwrittten signatures. Part of the early adopters of DocuSign’s electronic signature and electronic contract execution technology is real estate professionals.

Why is DocuSign a great fit for real estate?

Real estate agents are busy professionals – landing listings, showing homes, helping buyers find the right home, helping sellers sell their homes, preparing documents for their clients to sign… I could go on. In addition to DocuSign’s integration with transaction management solutions specifically for real estate, the DocuSign system provides other advantages as well.

DocuSign’s electronic signature and online contract execution service provides:

Time Savings: DocuSign’s integration with the major real estate forms providers (ZipLogix, RealFast, DocCentral, Reveal, IRES…) means that you can use the technology you already have to create your documents.Templates from DocuSign Professional Advance enable you to save even more time if you repeatedly send many standard documents. Just create the document once, save it as a template, and use the template moving forward. This saves you even more time.

DocuSign also automates reminders, so you don’t have to remember to call or email to follow up every few days. DocuSign automatically reminds your signers that they have documents awaiting their signatures!

Increased client satisfaction: DocuSign’s senders report that signers also appreciate the convenience and ease of electronic signature and online contract execution. Imagine this: your client is suddenly called away on business and things start moving. Do you really want to ask your client to print out copies of the papers for signature, sign, and then fax back? It’s one more thing for your client to do when he or she is very busy.

Instead, you can send your client an email with a link that takes him or her to a secure site. Your client can log in, adopt his or her signature, apply it where indicated by the yellow stick-e-tabs. Once your client has finished the process, you receive an email notification that the signing process is complete. No more hunting for a fax machine, no more phone tag to confirm that the fax arrived to the right hands, and best of all, no more putting life on hold because you have to get papers signed.

Clear, completed documents, every time: The yellow stick-e-tabs make sure that senders get the signatures and initials they need. This means that you don’t have to fax and re-fax documents because page 21 is missing some initials. Faxes also aren’t as clear – the document quality gets more and more degraded as papers are faxed back and forth. With DocuSign, senders can see what documents are still in process and which ones are completed, all from one dashboard.

What other reasons have you experienced that show the fit between real estate and electronic signature / electronic contract execution?