Pretty Please, Don’t Fax Me Your Real Estate Documents!
I’ve written about this subject before, but it bears repeating that some of us don’t care for faxing or faxed document. Faxing is antiquated, wood-burning technology, in my opinion.
First of all, if you’re an agent who’s making an earnest attempt to go paperless and to be more efficient, faxing any document adds an unnecessary step to the process. A fax machine kicks out a piece of paper, which you must then stuff into a file folder. You have to scan that piece of paper in order to add it to your electronic archive.
On the contrary, when you email a document that’s been scanned into Adobe .PDF format, it’s ready to label and archive. Or skip the email and simply scan the document, then store it in Google Docs for later retrieval by the recipient. It can be printed out later, if you wish. But in the meantime, it’s ready for storage on a backup drive, flash drive or in the “Cloud”.
Depending on the age and quality of the sender’s fax machine (as well as the age and quality of the recipient’s fax machine), a fax can arrive looking grainy, smudged, grey or downright illegible. In a real estate transaction, an illegible fax is worthless and a liability. Even with high quality fax machines on both ends of the phone line, each generation of sending, signing and re-faxing results in poorer quality than the previous one. After a document has been faxed, received, signed and returned, it will almost certainly be less sharp than the initial document.
PDF formatted faxes remain sharp and clear time after time, regardless of how many times they are sent and received (unless the user’s scanner is either really dirty or smudged).
The problem with Faxes is:
Fax machines operate at the mercy of phone lines.
Fax machines consume paper and eat ink cartridges.
Fax machines take up additional space in your office and add to the maze of wires between your phone and the wall (I consider landlines nothing but ancient tech as well).
By comparison,
Scanned electronic documents can be read on your smartphone or tablet.
Scanned electronic documents don’t need to be printed at all, unless you have to have a paper copy.
Scanned electronic documents can be stored without wasting paper or ink.
In conclusion, scanning documents to an electronic file and storing them electronically is cleaner and greener by far than faxing. It saves wood pulp and expensive plastic ink cartridges. The paper copies never need to be shredded, because there are none.
Agents extol the time-saving virtues of DocuSign and similar products that allow for electronic document signatures. What’s the big difference between wasting time and money on pen & ink signatures and wasting time and money on fax paper, ink cartridges and paper document storage?
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