Simplifying Transaction Management with Rooms for Real Estate

It’s no surprise that the typical real estate deal takes 50 days to close. These are complex, highly regulated, paper-driven transactions that involve many people and a high volume of documents. Most brokerages use e-signature to simplify and speed up contract signing, but they’re still relying on tedious manual workflows for the rest of the agreement process. As a result, deals still take a long time to close and are prone to errors, creating risk and frustration for real estate professionals and their clients.

A transaction management software solution such as DocuSign Rooms for Real Estate can eliminate these siloed, manual processes by allowing agents, transaction coordinators and brokers to create a central, secure, digital workspace for all processes and files in a transaction. In this blog we review the challenges of a paper-based real estate process and how Rooms for Real Estate can help solve these challenges to create better experiences for all parties involved.

How to know if you need transaction management software

When brokers, agents and transaction coordinators have to fill out paperwork, complete manual checklists and chase down updates on contract status, it can slow down deals and introduce the potential for human error. Such inefficiency also prevents agents from spending more time with clients and growing their business. Managing real estate transactions using paper-based processes creates significant challenges for a brokerage:

• Lack of standardization. Each agent and transaction coordinator could be using a different approach for managing real estate documents, leaving brokers without visibility into where they can improve processes and support staff. 
• Compliance risk. When real estate professionals must fill in so many different forms, they can easily overlook a field or enter incorrect information. Without a central view into transactions, the brokerage is unable to verify that all the correct steps have been completed.  
• Siloed systems. Even when a brokerage is using e-signature, without a central location to manage documents and an end-to-end integrated workflow that connects all your systems from lead to close, agents can get frustrated and may ultimately move to a brokerage that offers a more seamless process.

How Rooms for Real Estate can help

A transaction management system (TMS) can solve these brokerage challenges and accelerate the speed of deals—which means more money for the agent and brokerage. With DocuSign Rooms for Real Estate agents and transaction coordinators can set up a secure, virtual room wherein they complete every step of the transaction process, from filling out forms and gathering signatures to completing broker checklists and approvals. A customizable and reusable template for each room guides agents through the steps to complete a transaction. This allows brokers to standardize required documents and set task lists, due dates and reminders. Standardization also helps improve compliance so you can sleep well at night knowing that each step of the transaction is correct, completed and auditable.

While there are consistent overarching steps in a typical real estate transaction, every firm does things slightly different. Brokerages can customize Rooms to match their unique workflows, user permissions and office hierarchy. 

Building a connected platform is easy because Rooms naturally integrates with best-of-breed CRMs and back-office systems. Robust APIs make it simple to connect to additional systems. This integration reduces the need to manually type and retype information, saves time, reduces errors, and helps create the modern real estate experience agents expect. 

DocuSign is committed to keeping brokers and agents in control of their data, and has created a data standard and policy that protects users’ privacy and data access rights. When using Rooms for Real Estate, the brokerage retains ownership and control of all data.

How does Rooms for Real Estate work?

DocuSign Rooms for Real Estate is a cloud-based real estate software solution for brokers and agents that offers total transaction management. Rooms for Real Estate can be used to manage all transaction documents:

• Buyer/seller agreements
• Seller’s disclosures
• Offer agreements
• Contingency releases
• Repair addendums
• Amendments
• Appraisals
• Home inspection certificates
• Insurance policies
• Home warranty plan documents
• Closing disclosures
• Estimated closing statements

The brokerage can customize workflows in Rooms to match how their company operates, standardize required documents, set task lists, due dates, and reminders that can be reapplied to each room. Every role in a brokerage has different permissions. In Rooms, brokers can configure roles and permissions to ensure participants can only see and take action on documents they’re supposed to.

When an agent or transaction coordinator initiates a transaction in Rooms, team members are automatically added based on their account configuration. They can also send internal and external invitations to additional people to collaborate. 

The agent or transaction coordinator then preps forms for the appropriate parties to review and/or sign. Preparing the forms is simple because Rooms allows agents to access the latest association, MLS or brokerage-specific forms needed for a transaction. DocuSign maintains direct partnerships with associations to ensure you’re always getting the correct, most up-to-date version of a form tagged and ready to go. Rooms also connects with CRM systems to automatically populate the appropriate fields in the documents, such as the listing price, address, buyer name and information. 

Using DocuSign eSignature, pre-integrated with Rooms for Real Estate, the agent can send out the invitations to buyers and sellers to review and sign the documents. Recipients can review and sign in the familiar, trusted e-signature solution from practically any device. Once signed, the forms will remain secure in the Room and the agent will be notified. 

Rooms can also help keep agents and transaction coordinators on track with a predefined task list for each transaction. This ensures all agents know exactly which forms to use and which steps to take for each transaction type, to keep processes consistent and compliant across the brokerage. 

Brokerage leaders, meanwhile, can monitor the progress of transactions. This will allow them to step in and help if needed or discover ways to create greater efficiencies. Based on their task approval configuration, they can ensure agents follow their defined process and have complete oversight with multiple levels of approval. 

Rooms for Real Estate can also connect with back-office accounting software to pull out and input data, allowing agents and brokers to get paid as quickly as possible. This improves efficiency and workflows so real estate professionals can complete transactions faster, with less risk, at lower costs and with better experiences for everyone involved.

How brokerages are using Rooms for Real Estate to reduce expenses and increase productivity

Dilbeck Real Estate, an independent, family-owned brokerage with 14 offices throughout Southern California, deployed Rooms to help its 600 agents get out of the office more often but remain connected to the transaction process. By ensuring agents, staff and clients have access to the documents they need to process a deal, Rooms eliminated much of the legwork of a transaction.  

Dilbeck agents set up task lists within Rooms for each transaction to ensure all necessary steps are completed and approved before a transaction can be closed. If there’s an audit, brokerage leaders are confident that all files are complete and organized. 

Since deploying Rooms, Dilbeck significantly reduced expenses, including 50% less in paper costs, and increased agent productivity. 

Learn more about DocuSign Rooms for Real Estate.