I love 'Toy Story' and the postivie outlook of the toys in this movie, especially Buzz Lightyear who truely believes he will go "to infinitey and beyond!" Well that is our motto for 2012/2013 - "to paperless and beyond!" Thankfully DocuSign is one of the fabulous programs we are learning that will help us arrive.
I did not take part of the first DocuSign contest in February 2011, but I read many of the posts and I began to realize that Joy Daniels Real Estate Group could be a part of the paperless movement. My senses began to perk up whenever I heard "DocuSign" or talk about "paperless" and I began to pay attention.
For this challenge I don't have to admit to not following a plan that I made in the last one, what I can do is take a deep sigh of relief because I finally did something about going paperless. It took me a year, but in February 2012 we signed up with DocuSign. Maybe I was a slow learner, but I did learn! Myself and my Team are thrilled with what we can do with this program. We continue to learn new things this program can accomplish and are amazed and thrilled.
For those of you that have not used DocuSign and are curious as to how a Real Estate Agent might use the program, let me give you a quick tutorial! DocuSign is a totally electronic program for signing documents through email - and the signatures are accepted by other Realtors, Lenders & Title Companies! Any paperwork needing a signature or initials can be sent using this program without ever printing a page. It cost effective because we can use Zip Forms 6 with the Docusign program.
Zip Forms allows us to create our documents/state contracts/addendums, etc. online (The Pennyslvania Association of Realtor contracts are all there!) and then send this "paperwork" through DocuSign to our clients the paperless way! After they sign or initial, it comes back to us without ever printing one page of paper and we have a great ".jpg" that we can forward or save.
Not only does Docusign save on paper, it saves tremendous amounts of time. Our clients do not have to travel to us and we don't need to travel to them to sign paperwork (Did I mention the gas savings?). They are signing in the convenience of their own homes (locally or if they have moved out of state) or even while on vacation or traveling with work! Our clients LOVE IT! They think we are on the cutting edge! They love the ease and efficiency this program provides.
Another thing that we have done this year to move towards paperless is printing our "Listing Presentation" Booklet on both sides of the paper. We have reduced the cost of printing and cut our paper use for these booklets in half! Now we are creating a program for our presentations that will involve using our laptop or iPad and only leaving the booklets for those who don't use computers.
Another move to beyond is rather than printing the comparables that I take with me to listing appointments, I email myself the listings from our Multi-List and pull them up on my iPad when I am meeting with the Seller. After we are done, I ask them if they want me to email them the link so they can go through the comparables again on their own. This has greatly reduced the amount of paperwork (and ink) I used to print for my listing appointments.
The fun part of going "Green" is that we went "Green" with our sign and logo colors when we opened Joy Daniels Real Estate Group in April of 2010 without even realizing the significance of choosing that color scheme. We are opening a 2nd office in the Central Pennsylvania area by October 1, 2012 and can honestly say "The grass IS going to be GREENER!" on this West Shore, Camp Hill street!
Comments(17)