ActiveRain & Kodak Contest: A challenge to go paperless

What does your office look like?  Take a good look around.  My bet is that there are mountains of paperwork flowing like a river out of cabinets, file folders, binders and anything else we use to "organize" our lives.  There's stacks of paper on your desk that rival Mount Everest and the chair, well, forget about sitting in it. Face it, you're engulfed in a paper world.

With our industry, paper is a given and sometimes even a necessity.  For this month's ActiveRain & Kodak contest, we don't want you to go completely paperless, because that's not necessarily a realistic thing.  Instead, focus on going paper-less.  By reducing those piles, you can create efficiencies in your job and even cut costs here and there.  

In years past, when a client would call you asking a question about the property you looked at last week, you'd pull out the listing binder and look through it for information on the listing. The MLS has made that practice obsolete.  Instead of shifting through binder after binder to find the exact property, you pull it up right on your computer.  Do this a few times a week and you've saved yourself a lot of time! But in many ways, we are still enslaved to paper. Does it have to be this way?

My wife and I recently purchased a condo where I never even saw the condo before we signed the contract. We had been looking for a while, but when the perfect place for us became available, I was out of town, and we had to move fast to make sure we got it. In order to sign the contract, our REALTOR® sent me the documents via an electronic signature application and I was able to sign from across the country. No faxing, no printing it out, no signing then faxing back. In fact, both parties signed the contract without anyone having to print a piece of paper! As the client of this REALTOR®, I was saved a ton of time.

For this month's contest, we want to help you help your business by getting you thinking about your efficiencies and your organization.  The challenge? Create a mini-business plan on how you will reduce the amount of paper you use and why this will be helpful to your business and your clients. We all have stacks of old documents and contracts lying around in boxes and cabinets too. How can we image those documents to free up space and create permanent backups?

To jumpstart your creativity, here are some ideas on how to go paperless:

• Enter in your stack of business cards into an electronic rolodex
• Use a scanner to electronically file all notes, documents and contracts about various properties
• Look into the option of an electronic signature program
• Set up an e-fax number so you receive faxes electronically
• Use a scanner to scan the entire file at the completion of the deal or store past files

The Contest:

Create a blog post that details a mini-business plan to go paper-less.  Use that office of yours as inspiration.  Look at all of the papers you have stacked up and get creative on how to reduce them. Include at least three ways that you plan to implement technology to reduce the amount of paper you use.

• Posts must be a minimum of 200 words and a maximum of 500 words.
• Include: 'Paper-less Challenge' in the title of your blog post somewhere.
• Put your post in the 'ActiveRain' channel and use the topic 'Kodak Paper-less Challenge'.
• In the post place the following text in the bottom: 
  "This post is written as a submission to the ActiveRain & Kodak Paper-less Challenge contest.  I have the chance to win the high speed KODAK SCANMATE i1120 Scanner, great for helping real estate professionals reduce their stacks of paper by scanning contracts, photos and business cards in seconds."
• Include a link to the blog post in the comment section of this blog.  This is what we will use to award points so make sure your link is in a comment on this post).
• Place a link to your blog post on the ActiveRain Facebook page or share it with us on Twitter (optional).

Posts must be submitted by Friday, February 25th, 2011 at 11:59pm Eastern Time.

The Prizes:

A winner will be chosen at random and will be announced via a video blog.  *Only one entry per person.

In addition to the random prizes, we will also use eight of the more well written posts in a special newsletter focused on going paperless in your business.

1st Place wins:

• KODAK SCANMATE i1120 Scanner ($495 MSRP)
• 5,000 ActiveRain points

2nd Place wins:

• 3,500 ActiveRain points
• ActiveRain T-shirt
• ActiveRain Community Sponsorship

3rd Place wins:

• 2,500 ActiveRain points
• ActiveRain T-shirt

All entries get:

• 2,000 ActiveRain points