As of July 1st, 2015, electronic signatures have become legal for use in Ontario Real Estate, and recently, our Office along with many others in Thunder Bay have adopted Docusign as our ESignature provider. This is fantastic and exciting news, and really changes the face of how efficiently and seamlessly documents can be signed, and also supports our Office initiative of moving towards a paperless platform.
Last week, I had the opportunity to work with another Agent and her Buyers on an agreement of purchase and sale and we were all able to work completely online, using ESignatures, to complete the offer. From this experience, it was easy to see several benefits to the incorporation of ESignatures into the Real Estate transaction;
- Completely legible documents at the end of a negotiation, where a paper based negotiation might have been faxed back and forth several times with several changes, resulting in an often hard to interpret final reading.
- Huge time savings and convenience- I’m sure that as much as our Clients love us, sometimes- ie- at 11:00 PM on a Wednesday night, they might just prefer to sign documents online via ESignature, rather than having me over for a visit.
- Improved organization- while I must admit, I would consider myself to be a fairly well organized and detail oriented Real Estate Agent (I use Dropbox to store my documents for quick and anytime access), I do love the fact Docusign stores and organizes all documents in transaction ‘envelopes’ for easy anytime reference and also allows me to track what’s out for signature, and what has been completed.
- Complete security- Docusign is completely secure and safe- it uses Bank- level security standards and technology to ensure that all transactions, documents, and personal information are safe and secure.
- Document Integrity- Documents can be locked after after being signed so that no further changes can be made, and they are also time stamped, allowing a perfect document history to be accessed.
- No more misplaced paperwork or missing pages- our Office Secretary will particularly enjoy this benefit!
I for one look very much forward to working with my Clients and other Realtors using this new technology; I still have much to learn, but am looking forward to embracing such a positive change in how we do business on a day to day basis.
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