10 Must Haves In a Brokerage Paperless System and Vendor

A paperless system should be easy to use, but it's too easy to get lured in by a slick demo, only to realize later, the system doesn't really have all the tools you need. It may be easy for an agent to get a document into the system, but can your staff really manage the files? Does the system have the tools your office admin or transaction coordinator needs to do their job, all within that paperless system?

Here's a list of what we think are ten must haves:

1. An Established and Stable Vendor – You're putting your most important business documents in the cloud. Will the company be there in a year, three years, five years? Are they an established company or a new VC funded startup? If you're really going paperless and want to make sure the files are there when you need them, make sure your vendor will be around in the long run.

2. Document Retention and Security – Along the same lines, the vendor should keep all of the transaction files for a minimum of the legal retention period on your state (and not charge you extra to do so). All of your data, documents and transactions should also be stored in multiple data centers in multiple metro areas for protection against manmade and natural disasters.

3. A Customer Service Portal – Clients want 24/7/365 access to information. They don't want to have to wait to be able to reach their agent before they can access a document they want right now (even at 2am). A good customer service portal should allow an agent to give customers secure access to documents in the transaction and to define which documents they should be able to view. That access portal should also be flexible enough to allow access to other participants such as title companies and attorneys, on a custom basis with templated security profiles for each role.