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Real Estate Paperwork - Sign HERE! (and here, and here, and copy here...)

By Josh & Dawn McKinley

Real Estate Agent

July 18, 2010 04:18 PM

Piles of Paper - Creative Commons http://www.flickr.com/photos/loty/326761635/ A lot of people don't realize how much paper is generated when buying or selling real estate - there are hundreds of pages of contracts, inspection reports, lender documents - the list seems endless! I think I've gone through at least two reams of paper in the last few weeks alone. However, after reading an article posted on the Arizona Association of Realtors blog about the importance of having a professional PDF writer program when working in real estate, I decided to start looking into buying one for our Peoria AZ real estate home office.

WOW! I knew that these programs didn't come cheap, but some of these prices were staggering! $899 for ActivePDF Toolkit and between $299 and $699 for the grandfather of all PDF programs, Adobe Acrobat. Even the "budget" alternatives, CutePDF and NitroPDF, run $89 and $99, respectively. So, I decided to do a little research for free alternatives to these very capable programs.

1) NitroPDF has a great set of free PDF tools available straight on their website! My favorite of these is PDF Hammer, which allows a user to upload a PDF to their website, rearrange and delete pages, and then save the new PDF straight to their local hard drive. However, because PDF Hammer is online, it does fall prey to server accessibility issues at time.

2) PDF Split and Merge (PDFSAM) is my solution to the PDF Hammer "server down" messages. PDFSAM is a free, open source tool for splitting and merging PDF files. It may not have the slickest GUI around, but it's super functional and easy to use.

3) Another really nifty free tool from NitroPDF is the NitroPDF Reader. It's officially "beta" software, so there are bugs, but I haven't really run into many show-stoppers. NitroPDF Reader does almost anything you would want out of a PDF editor. It creates PDFs from other documents, extracts text and images from the PDF, and allows you to type on the PDF and stamp pages - immensely useful when working with short sale files.

4) A tool that I don't have to use often, but does come in handy, is one that will convert whole PDF pages into images. There are more than a few products that will do this, but I happen to like the simply namedConvertPDFtoImage. It's also an online product, so could go away at a moment's notice, but there are a lot of others that would slip into its' place, in that case.

5) Occasionally I'll run across a PDF that is password-protected against changes - frustrating when all I want to do is stamp the pages with my seller's short sale information. In these cases, I'll use Freeware PDF Unlocker to gain editing access to the file. Like most freeware, it may not work 100% of the time, but I haven't had a problem yet.

Toolbox - Creative Commons License - http://www.flickr.com/photos/lara604/3271669689/

So that's my free PDF toolbox - what free tools do you use to make your work easier?

Photos distributed through the Creative Commons License.

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Amanda Nicodemus

Spring Texas Keller Williams Professionals - Cypresswood - Spring, TX

Spring Texas Real Estate www.amandahomes.com

Hi Dawn,

Great post on the different PDF programs out there. I just signed up for the 30 day trial DocuSign program. It's great! I just emailed my client in Canada the listing agreement, disclosures & all he had to do was click to sign/initial. When I receive it, I print an original. Works directly from Zipforms or other real estate applications.

Jul 18, 2010 04:28 PM

Cara Marcelle Mancuso

Golden Girls with SW Desert Homes - Tucson, AZ

Call a Marana neighbor, I'm THERE!

Wow - aren't you CLEVER? I love being thrifty and you just knocked my sox off! Thank you so much for sharing this resource. I usually just select print and can turn something into a PDF that way, but I've tried finding online PDF resizing tools, and they just don't make them as small as my work copier. It's hard to email 20 pages from my home computer. I will look into your links and see what I can find. Thanks again.

Jul 18, 2010 04:28 PM

Tammie White, Broker

Franklin Homes Realty LLC - Franklin, TN

Franklin TN Homes for Sale

It's times like these that I feel "techno-challenged"!!

Jul 18, 2010 04:36 PM

Josh & Dawn McKinley

Peoria, AZ

Amanda - I definitely would use DocuSign or something similar (the AAR is evaluating programs now in order to be able to offer it to us - we're lucky!). However, I would watch out for using electronic signatures with your short sales - we just had to kick back a whole bunch of paperwork to the buyer of one of our short sales because the bank required a "real" signature.

Cara - One of the things that I do with my PDFs is make sure that I save them as "black and white" rather than "color," when I scan them in. It significantly reduces the size of the PDFs!

Tammie - Don't worry about it! We all are in some ways - that's why ActiveRain is such a great resource!

Jul 18, 2010 04:41 PM

Julia Odom

Select Realty Professionals - Chattanooga, TN

Chattanooga Homes for Sale

I'm a paper-hater (I admit it!) so I'm going to have to check some of these out. I'm using ScanSoft Paperport - software that came with my printer/scanner - right now but I'll bet you've got some better options. I use EchoSign for my e-signatures instead of DocuSign but I don't know which one is really better.

One service I like that you didn't mention is FillAnyPDF.com. You can upload docs, add text, highlight or redact and then download them again. Free and pretty reliable.

Jul 26, 2010 11:05 AM

Josh & Dawn McKinley

Peoria, AZ

Julia - FillAnyPDF.com sounds like a very cool tool! The subscription isn't that pricey, either... I think the FAQ said it was $19 a month

Jul 26, 2010 11:18 AM

Song San

Coldwell Banker Dynasty - Rosemead, CA

Broker, MBA

I got a Neato scanner about 2 months ago and been electronically archiving my papers, receipts, etc. and can easily search through them. It has make my life a lot easier since I was archiving a bag or two of papers per day.

I am still looking into DocuSign for the esignatures. Right now still doing the old fashion way of emailing, have them sign, scan them, and email to me. Can't wait to change.

Jul 28, 2010 08:20 PM

Josh & Dawn McKinley

Peoria, AZ

I've seen those Neato scanners, though I'm not sure of the advantage unless you get their mobile version - now THAT is cool. Scanning on the go!

Jul 29, 2010 01:51 PM

Donne Knudsen

Los Angeles & Ventura Counties in CA - Simi Valley, CA

CalState Realty Services

Dawn - You might want to check into an online service. One of the MLS boards here offers an online service called MongoFax to the members for free (it's a service included in our membership dues). I'm sure non-members can get it for a small fee.

Aug 21, 2010 10:58 AM

Josh & Dawn McKinley

Peoria, AZ

Good idea, Donne! We're actually using one (NextivaFax) that ended up being cheaper than what our association has available, but is really nice.

Aug 22, 2010 09:52 AM

Cliff Paulick

End Zone Realty - Owasso, OK

From page 2 of 14 (http://www.zipform.com/eula/ziplogixeula.pdf):

C. Forms Software; Portable Data Format (.pdf): Other File Formats. zipLogix grants you the right to use the Forms Software to export the desktop, online and multi-user versions of the forms to .pdf format. The export of the forms will result in the creation of a .pdf file. zipLogix shall not be responsible for providing you with the applicable software to open, view or otherwise use the .pdf file. Forms exported from the Forms Software to .pdf format may not be altered, manipulated or changed in any way, including but not limited to, altering the form text or data, "unlocking" or otherwise opening or attempting to open or bypass the security/password protection of a .pdf form, making a derivative work(s), adding any data, text, graphics or software into or on top of a form, converting the form from .pdf format to a different file format, removing copyright dates and/or symbols, and removing company specific information which is embedded in the form unless expressly permitted by the copyright holder of the form. Any violation of this section shall be deemed a material breach of this Agreement and may result in a violation of law and result in civil and/or criminal penalties. You may not reproduce or display blank .pdf versions of the forms in the Forms Software (i.e. forms with no text filled into the fillable portion of the forms), on the Internet or in any other manner, unless expressly permitted by the copyright holder of the forms. Such actions may constitute a copyright violation of the copyright owner's forms, may result in a violation of law and civil and/or criminal penalties and, in addition to any other remedies, may result in the termination of this Agreement by zipLogix. Certain fonts in your computer's operating system/software may be missing or corrupt due to no fault of the Forms Software, which may result in formatting, saving, printing and e-mailing problems or other errors in your .pdf documents. If you experience problems or errors in .pdf documents due to missing or corrupted fonts, please contact your computer system/software provider (e.g. Microsoft, Apple, etc.) or Adobe (www.adobe.com) for assistance.

I'm not the ZipForm police--heck, I found your post because I was searching what my ZipForm PDF password might be--but I guess they don't want us doing what we want to do for practical reasons... :(

Feb 26, 2011 12:35 AM

Josh & Dawn McKinley

Peoria, AZ

Wow, that's an interesting way to find this blog post! Please note that I'm not actually talking about altering a PDF that was exported from Zipforms, but rather pdfs that were created by us, usually by scanning in hard copies of documents. Those may or may not be documents created from forms that originally were found in Zipforms - most of time time it seems like they're financial info from our short sellers!

Thanks for reading!

Feb 26, 2011 04:00 AM