One of the content themes at Inman News’ Real Estate Connect NYC was the paperless real estate transaction. What does the future look like, who must participate and what are the standards? Here are the top 10 takeaways we identified at the close of the conference:
1. This is not a tech problem: Technology already exists to make the paperless real estate transaction a reality.
2. Legislation for e-signatures is in place, removing one of the largest hurdles to making a paperless transaction possible. However, arcane local rules make some parts of the process slow to adapt to paperless.
3. Industry acceptance and adoption of methods, standards and technology for automated transactions lags overall.
4. Uniform technology standards remains one of the most complicated and expensive challenges the industry faces in moving forward with automated transactions.
5. Forward-looking brokers who force change by implementing automated transaction platforms will be the group most likely to remove paper from real estate deals.
6. We need a mortgage standard, a real estate transaction standard and an overreaching standard that covers both.
7. Consumers need a uniform digital document-signing experience before electronic mortgages will really take off.
8. Real estate companies need to recognize the business value in implementing automated transaction systems before they will adopt them in significant numbers.
9. The technology needs to adapt to what consumers are already using. If they have to download or install software for it to work, they won’t do it.
10. Change is inevitable. Real estate transactions eventually will be automated, involving little to no paper.
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