No Signature Required – the Emergence of ONE TOUCH EXECUTION of Documents

The COVID-19 crisis has put digital solutions front and centre of how we do business.

Although Digital Signing technology has been around for years, the consumer market was slow on the uptake due to old habits dying hard. There was also a certain hesitation from businesses as to the legal reliability of digital signatures. Even the advice coming from solicitors was old-school, as they themselves continued to do things ‘the old way’.

From about two years ago, we started to see a shift as the rising appetite in the marketplace for doing business on mobile devices put pressure on our legal processes to ‘catch up’. Last year our agency got the green light from our advisers to start using digital signatures for some of our documents, beginning with our Appointment of Agent Agreements for sales and rentals.

However, with an average of over 100 Lease Agreements executed per month, the most significant improvement in efficiency for our agency came when we started digitally signing our Leases.  And with no printing required, tenants were signing and returning leases within a week.

We thought this was pretty good.  And then in April, ‘One Touch Execution’ for Lease Agreements was launched by RealWorks (our forms provider), and the game suddenly changed again.

This new technology allows parties to legally and securely execute documents digitally without the need for signatures. Users are taken through a simple wizard, ensuring total transparency and acknowledgement of what they are agreeing to. Our tenants have responded favourably and because they do not have to subscribe to a digital signature program, return rate through the system is 100% and turnaround time has been reduced to mere days.

Enabling this sort of cutting-edge technology to enhance the service to our tenant clients results in real benefits to our owner clients in ensuring legally compliant documentation and securing stable tenancies.

‘Watch this space’ for more news on how we are implementing cutting-edge technology to enhance our client experience and ensure maximum business efficiency.