The title of this lesson is from the song “Signs” made popular by the band Tesla, but it has another meaning for real estate investors.
It seems like investors are always signing stuff:
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Purchase Contracts
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Leases
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Option Agreements
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Independent Contractor Agreements
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Lead Paint Addendums
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Mortgage Paperwork
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Yadda, yadda, yadda
Besides checking on the chances for Carpel Tunnel litigation, there doesn’t seem to be much relief from all the signatures we have to provide. Not to mention all the signatures we have to collect from others.
Up until the internet age, it meant printing out tons of paper copies, making photocopies for all parties, and carrying stacks of paper from one party in the transaction to the other. To some extent the process is still that way. FedEx and UPS made the transactions happen a little faster, but they’re still not ideal.
Today things are becoming much better. Thanks to two services, real estate investors and agents, along with mortgage brokers and tenants, can sign documents electronically. Cue the parade!
This is especially helpful if you are trying to grow your real estate and financial empire virtually. Care to sit on a Caribbean beach and do a wholesale deal or flip a house? Might be difficult to do if you need to fly back home to sign paperwork. Or hope the mail reaches you in ‘Bob-Marleyville.’
So without further ado, let me show you two ways to sign everything electronically, and most importantly – legally. Both services are not that expensive, and the second one even has a free version.
DocuSign – The Big Mama in Real Estate
It seems like a lot of realtors these days are doing transactions using DocuSign. In fact, DocuSign has a special service customized for the real estate industry. They try to also make it very ‘mobile friendly’ because they know that people in the real estate industry spend most of their time away from the office.
DocuSign requires a monthly subscription payment (free for the first 30 days), but the price can be as low as $10/month, if you have fewer than 5 documents to sign. The more documents and the more users you need, the higher the price.
In order to use DocuSign, you just sign up with an account. Then, go into your account and set up your profile. Your profile will include your company name or address. The information that you provide can then be stored and easily added to your documents automatically.
Next, you will upload your document. The document can be in any of the popular formats. DocuSign will convert it into an editable file and allow you to specify which fields you would like filled in as open fields. For example:
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Signature
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Printed Name
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Initials
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Company Address
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Date
You can also save your work as a template. So when you are doing a massive amount of wholesale deals, you can just pull up the same template for each one.
To have the other party sign the document, you will be prompted for their email. DocuSign will create an email to them with a link for them to click. The link will take them to the form. If this is the first time that person has used DocuSign, the program will prompt them to choose a certain font for their signature. Once everyone has signed, DocuSign will send everyone an email confirmation.
Everyone’s signatures are legally binding and enforceable in court.
You can print out the document, save it where you want or just leave the document in the cloud storage DocuSign provides.
Docusign also shows you a dashboard for your account. From the dashboard, you can track various analytics to let you know how many documents you have sent out, how many have been returned, and what types of documents they are. This can be very useful as your transaction rate grows.
Check out this cool video summary of DocuSign.
HelloSign, For Free
An alternative to DocuSign is called HelloSign, which provides most of the same functions as DocuSign, but has a free alternative.
HelloSign will let you sign up to 3 documents a month for free. This seems like a perfect situation if you are a landlord who has tenants move out every so often. You can have the new tenants sign leases through HelloSign. Also if you just do one wholesale deal a month or so (not a bad gig), you can use HelloSign for free.
The big difference between HelloSign and DocuSign seems to be a lack of a dashboard for HelloSign. Investors should not miss the dashboard too much if they don’t have a ton of paperwork every month.
Another difference is that Hellosign lets you upload the documents directly into your favorite cloud storage. DocuSign has its own storage.
Here’s HelloSign’s cool video.
Got a pen?
Electronic signing of documents is growing. Although we have a long way to go before we are truly paperless, we are getting closer and closer all the time.
Holla at us
Do you like the idea of signing electronically and limiting the amount of paper you use every deal? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below.
Pick a Document Signing Website or Program – It’ll help be prepared so you can have the other party sign the documents as quickly as possible. Electronic signatures may be one of your best tools to get the deal under contract – fast.
Prepare Your Documents Ahead of Time – These programs will help you keep your docs all in one place so you can finish the deal cleanly and quickly.
Research the Best Documents –As you see other leases, purchase agreements and real estate paperwork, ‘borrow’ the best clauses from them and incorporate them into your documents.
Run Your Documents By Your Lawyer – Many ‘gurus’ let you download their ‘killer’ forms that they promise are bullet proof. The trouble is that the guru used the forms in California and you are in Illinois. Make sure the contracts are enforceable in your state.
JP Moses
is a real estate investor in Memphis, TN, with experience ranging from land lording to note buying, rehabbing, and wholesaling. However, wholesaling is the area that he enjoys most and where he bring the most experience and expertise to his students.