Inman

Northern California brokerage has paperless plan

Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage, Northern California’s largest residential real estate brokerage company with 62 offices and about 3,600 sales associates, has launched a cloud-computing initiative called HomeBase that is intended to reduce paper consumption and improve client communications and document access via smartphones. The company has also launched an effort dubbed Project Greenlight that seeks to move the company to electronic documents for the entire homebuying process, with offices in Saratoga and Petaluma serving as the premier testers.

"Many of our customers are early adopters of advanced technology," said Rick Turley, president of Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage. "They’re used to conducting business on the run with smartphones and other mobile computing devices. Deploying cloud computing and moving toward a greener, paperless process is one more way to show our customers that we’re on the same page."

The HomeBase Transaction Management cloud platform was developed by Realogy Corp.; Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage is owned and operated by Realogy subsidiary NRT LLC. According to a company announcement, about 1.6 million documents were uploaded into the HomeBase system across all NRT-owned companies during the first half of the year, with about 18,000 clients using the system,.