I was working late in the office the other night and ran into a friend and colleague who was in the classic Realtor time-crunch. Ronald the Realtor — not this person’s real name — was in the process of writing up a contract, after which he had to
- Drive to wife-half-of-client-couple and get her signatures
- Come back to the office
- Fax contract to husband-half-of-client-couple (who was travelling) to get his signatures
- Wait for the contract to come back via fax
- Double check it for accuracy
To me, this looked like a classic test case for using electronic signatures, which would have transformed this 2 hour (at least) ordeal into a fairly easy 30 minute process, not to mention looking incredibly cool.
I wondered why Ronald wasn’t using e-signatures, since he’s a pretty successful, tech-savvy, smart individual who — to boot — had recently attended my e-signature training session.
Here’s my explanation: Of the three types of Realtors, electronic signatures don’t yet offer enough value for two of them, and for the third type, it’s a question of getting over the learning and comfort curve.
The three types of Realtors (at least for the purpose of this discussion) are:
- Low-volume
- High-volume
- Medium-volume
Low-volume Realtors might do four or five deals in a year, so saving time is not something they tend to be concerned about. High-volume Realtors tend to have one or more assistants, and saving them effort is usually not a high priority. It’s the third type of Realtor — medium-volume ones — for whom, I believe, e-signatures currently offer the most benefit.
Why aren’t they adopting it more quickly? Ironically, I think it’s largely because they’re just too busy to take the time to learn something new — and I’ll be the first to admit that the first couple of deals you do using e-signatures may well take you more time than the traditional method. Kind of an unfortunate Catch-22 for those folks.
Tags: E-signatures, Electronic signatures, Real estate, Real-estate-technology, Realtor-tech-tricks
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2 responses so far ↓
1 Lam chops: More links back to the self-motivating conversation . . . | BloodhoundBlog | The weblog of BloodhoundRealty.com in Phoenix, Arizona // Oct 25, 2006 at 10:35 pm
[...] More from Three Oceans Real Estate — Electronic signatures: what are you waiting for? I’m on the lo-tech end of this, for now. I’m told it’s potentially legal in Arizona, but I haven’t dug through the nitty-gritty details. [...]
2 John Lockwood // Feb 24, 2007 at 7:52 pm
Nice thread. I just started a similar discussion at my own blog, as I’m just starting to seriously consider offering this, so I enjoyed your comments.
I’m not sure the high volume producers are exempt — partly I think it’s a matter of what type of services you want to provide as well as what kind of clients you have. Since my main marketing vehicle is the Internet, it’s a natural for the clients I have.
Cheers
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