There are a few reasons why you may want to go paperless. I’m a neat freak; gung-ho on keeping everything organized so I can find it relatively easily at a later date. Perhaps you’d like to save a few trees in this world.
Either way, going paperless in your real estate business is very simple to do.
What You’ll Need
There are three areas you’ll need to get in order before taking the plunge. You’ll need money, the right tools, and a system for organizing your data on your computer or server.
Money
I hate making investments in my business that, when held accountable, equate to wasted dollars. This is why I always choose products that have gotten great reviews from people who’ve purchased it in the past.
Because of this, you may be paying slightly more to go paperless than you expect. In my opinion, it’s well worth the investment, and the rights tools make getting the job done much easier.
You are going to need at least $600 to purchase the tools below.
Tools
There are two main tools you’ll need to go paperless; a shredder and a scanner. Shredders drive me nuts; they’re loud, break down often, and never seem to last as long as I’d hope them to. I’ve used flatbed scanners in the past and hate how slow they operate in a normal business environment, so we’ll forgo a flatbed scanner in this article.
To store all your documents, you have a choice of using your computer’s hard drive or a flash drive. I’d personally grab a 4gb or 8gb flash drive from Newegg.com if you went the mobile storage route.
The Scanner – Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 – $389
After a $50 mail in rebate, this bad-boy comes out to be $389.
If you’re looking at buying the scanner at the time of this post, Newegg.com is also offering free shipping.
The Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 scanner lets you scan and store clear, crisp digital copies of all your color and black and white documents, quickly and easily. Scan both sides of any document from business card to legal-sized in a single pass, and you’ll get 150 dpi color images at 18 ppm! Best of all, the S510 fits into even the most crowded office, with a footprint about the size of a sheet of paper!
It’s a little more expensive than I’d like to spend on a scanner, but out of 115 reviews, this Fujitsu ScanSnap has gotten a 5 star rating from 80% Newegg.com shoppers who bought it. Not bad!
The document feeder is a definitely necessity for multi-page documents, and the one-touch PDF function will definetly come in handy for real estate agents. Anything that helps make technology more simple for an agent gets an A+ in my book.
The Shredder – Fellowes MS-450Cs – $186.99
With silent motor technology, and the ability to micro-shred your paperwork at 7 sheets per pass, this monster will eat up your unwanted paperwork in a hurry.
It’ll also take care of any credit cards you may need to shred for personal use.
The innovative Fellowes MS-450Cs is ideal for use in the home or office. MicroShred feature shreds up to 7 sheets per pass into 5/64 x 5/16” micro-cut particles as fast as 60 sheets per minute. NEW Ultra-Quiet Operation with virtually silent motor for use in shared spaces or cubicles. Patented SafeSense Technology stops shredder immediately when hands are too close to the paper opening.
With a $33 instant rebate, this Fellowes shredder will cost you $186.99 with free shipping at the time of this post.
Total – $575.99
Add in a $25 flash drive (with shipping) and you’re looking at paying around $600 total.
Filing System
Keeping your files all nice and tidy can be a tedious task. You definitely don’t want to pile everything into one folder on your computer or flash drive. In my experience, the more detailed you are with organizing your files, the better.
To keep my files organized on my computer, I like to organize them by client. Here’s a typical organizational structure I use:
- My Business Files
- Clients
- Doe, John
- Johnson, Mike
- Buyer – January 2, 2008
- Contracts
- Closing Documents
- Seller – March 24, 2008
- Listing Documents
- Buyer – January 2, 2008
- Stark, Tony
- and so on…
- Clients
As you can see, I organize all my files according to my clients last name. In my client name’s folder, I include another folder for 1) the type of client they were at the time and 2) what the date they became my client.
This helps me organize times when someone is a repeat client of yours; otherwise you’re going to go crazy chasing down documents from the same client that was working with you at two different time frames.
It’s probably not a fool-proof method, but it certainly makes my life much easier.
Have you gone paperless? What products/tools did you choose to get the job done? Are you happy about the transition?
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8 Comments on "Your Paperless Real Estate Business"
My company has now gone completely paperless from all of our mail to sending and receiving invoices. We still do receive a few checks in the mail but now many of our clients are even just doing bank transfers for the large payments in which they used to send checks. I think within 5 years most businesses will be paperless. I can’t remember the last time I wrote a letter with just a pen and paper.
Most companies are adapting to paperless Real estate business now!! Its a much easy way organize the business and very systematic too!!
Going paperless makes a lot of sense these days. Especially since everyone has a smart phone. Now you can have contracts emailed to your phone to review with clients instead of having to wait for that fax.
While going paperless is a great idea, I still can’t part from original signed contracts. I have managed to use paperport 11 to organize all of my PDF files, but still have a filing cabinet for my important hard copies.
Good post, I have been trying to go paperless in my office as possible. I would much rather use a computer to do my work.
To go paperless the document must start electronically. There is only one solution available today that allows you to conduct a transaction from start to finish without using paper. http://www.gopaperless.com
The key to being a paperless real estate professional in my opinion are 2 main things:
1) familiarizing yourself with your state DRE requirements for maintaining original wet signatures on certain documents, most in my office thought certain documents had to be maintained as originals but upon further investigation I discovered that CA DRE allows electronic document archiving of all documents as long as all documents an auditor would need can be easily printed
2) on a more basic level, having a multi-page scanner that can do black & white create .pdf files that are as small as possible, nothing bugs more than getting a 1 page grant deed scan from escrow as a 3MB file
I’ve found an incredibly useful piece of hardware to be the Brother MFC 7840W, it is a multi-function (scan,print,fax,copy), its laser so its economical, it does legal 8×14 and letter 8×11.5, its networkable RJ-45 or wireless (I recommend hard wire connect) and you can get it at Best Buy for under $300 ( think I got my last one for around $275). I have 2 one for home and 1 for office, they’re workhorses, reliable and dirt cheap for what they provide.
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