As real estate professionals, our work revolves around contracts that are written and executed.  From helping clients buy investment properties to renting our units for our investors, we deal with papers everyday.  One of the issues you run into when dealing with negotiations is the shrinkage of documents when scanned/emailed/faxed to the other party which results in a document that is very hard to read or illegible.  This can cause issues at the execution phase if the terms of the agreement aren’t clear to a party and the signed agreement isn’t legible.

This is also true for investors when they are leasing their units out.  The constant back and forth can leave documents very skewed.

If you run into this issue, I highly recommend to have the final copy of the agreement copied over to the party that drafted the original agreement and have all parties sign it.  If that isn’t possible, I highly recommend that you create a clarity copy and have all parties initial it and attach it with the original offer to make sure if anyone needs to reference it later, there is a clear copy available.  Documents such as survey and floor plans where small measurements are posted should always be scanned and emailed to the other party along with their lawyers to make sure they all have an electronic copy of it and can zoom in on the desired section to review it.  This will insure all parties have legible documents.

We have been using a new service called DocuSign under which we can sign documents electronically hence avoiding having to scan or fax documents which we found has eliminated a lot of the issues we were having in our business.  This also helps us in keeping an accurate electronic paper trail of all our signed documents and let’s us track which changes are being made.  The one downside to using the service is that not all users will read your contract in detail hence I would recommend having a conversation with the party signing beforehand to review the details of the contact before sending it to them for signatures.  The service allows the user to sign the contacts on any smartphone, tablet or computer and avoid having to print, sign and fax/email the documents back which my clients have really appreciated.

If you don’t sign contracts regularly, the cost can be a burden rather than a tool in which case you can call a friendly REALTOR that has the service to help you out.

What are some of the tools that you’re using in your business that help you increase efficiency in your operations?  Would love to hear from you.