Sacramento Real Estate Blog

Several months ago, I visited the subject of being able to provide buyers and sellers with the ability to sign their documents online. Recently when I was working with Mathew and Minie, the benefit of having the abilility to do this became even more apparent, because Mathew asked the (quite reasonable) question — Why aren’t Realtors® doing this yet? Look, you can do your taxes online, why can’t you sign your real estate paperwork the same way if you want?

When I last looked into this, I decided that the time and effort involved were not worth the trouble, because the main company that supported our real estate forms software had what I thought was a fairly kludgey solution requiring you to drag and drop electronic “sign here” stickies on each page. That’s not too onerous in itself, of course, but with a minimal purchase agreement weighing in these days at some 22 pages or so with disclosures, and given the fact that the last thing we want to do is hold up a buyer who’s ready to go, the process seemed to me to be too time consuming to be worthwhile.

I am happy to report, however, that our main electronic signatures provider, DocuSign, has recently released a Beta version of some software that’s destined to make this process much easier and faster to use, so that I think we’re ready to start serious work on rolling this out and making it available. This doesn’t mean that you have to use electronic signatures, of course — if you’re more comfortable working in person or by fax, of course we’ll still do business that way as well. I strongly suspect, however, that a lot of the folks who are users of this web site are the type of people who would find the convenience of being able to do their real estate paperwork online to be a real plus. For example, we often show people homes who live out of the area and who only decide on a purchase once they’ve gone home and “slept on it.”

Email software and web browsers have long ago replaced the fax machine as the communication medium of choice for many people. It’s time that Realtors® caught up with that, it seems to me, and got ourselves out of the dark ages.