Hi, I’m Beth with TB Properties Buys Land and today I wanted to discuss with you the role of technology in today’s land sales. Whenever we think about buying or selling a property, we might think about that time that we met with our realtor maybe at a coffee shop and we sign all the paperwork for them to first list our property. Fast forward to the time of sale when you meet your realtor in the elegant lobby of the title company and they escort you in and you go through for about an hour signing a bunch of paperwork and then they give you a huge packet of paperwork that you walk out with at the end of the signing.
Think about just how time-intensive that is when it comes to selling your property that way! I mean, think about it. I remember when we were trying to buy our house. My husband and I had to coordinate work schedules and then who’s going to watch the kiddos if it runs late? …that kind of thing. Today, things are a lot more different. There’s no doubt that technology has changed tremendously how real estate works. The advent of COVID has made technology even more important than ever before.
Today I want to share with you a transaction that we had done that was entirely remote or virtual from beginning to the very, very end. We had a young lady reach out to us across email, and she told us that she had inherited some property and she didn’t have a clear chain of title and she wanted to sell it because she lived on the other side of the country. She was never going to utilize the property and just wanted to move forward. She also told us that she preferred using email instead of phone calls back and forth. So it begins that she sends us the email, we respond, then we get a purchase agreement over to her via e-sign.
Have you ever used e-sign before? If you haven’t, most title companies will accept it (if not all!) as a legal form of signature. It’s great! With your email address, we can send an electronic copy of the document of that purchase and sale agreement. And again, our purchase agreement is really simple. It’s just one single page, but we send that electronic copy over to you, you read it just like you would a PDF. Then you can assign a signature font and you type your name in as you would sign. Now when you open it on your computer or your smartphone or your tablet to sign, it records your IP address of your computer and adds that to the last page of that purchase agreement. So even though the purchase agreement is only one page, the eSign will add an extra page which is the record of everybody who signs it. It records the date, the time you sign it, your email address and IP address of your computer. The Title Company will accept that as you signing the agreement and often they may have some eSign documents of their own if you are comfortable with eSign. Don’t worry – if this is too much technology, we can do this with paper and pen too!
Once everybody signs the purchase agreement, we send it over to the title company and the title company considers that a legal document. With regard to this transaction, we sent the copy off to the title company and they went and pulled all the paperwork from there. They sent her the affidavits of heirship that she had to sign. They sent her the closing documents. They sent her a shipping label. All she had to do is take the closing documents, that deed, and sign it in front of a notary at her local bank or shipping center. Then she used that label, that FedEx overnight label, and shipped everything back to the title company. The Title company sent us the paperwork we needed and we sent it back. We sent our funds to the title company and the title company reached out to her and said, “Hey, how do you want to receive your cash?” They dispense cash in the form of a cashier’s check that they’ll mail to you, or they’ll wire the funds directly into your account, whatever you prefer.
They reached out to her across email entirely. We chatted with her over email entirely. And then after the end of the transaction, I emailed her. I said, “Hey, I’d love to hear what you thought about the whole process.” She said, “Beth, this was so fast.” She said, “From the time I sent you an email, to the time that I got the check in the mail,” she said it was so incredibly fast and it was so easy. She said, “I wish I could do this again with you guys.”
In any case, if you have any concerns about how the closing process works, if you don’t want to worry about showing up in person… I mean, she’s on the other side of the country… She can’t afford to go and take a plane in order to sign some paperwork… Reach out to us, give us a call at 214-699-4455, shoot us an email, reach out to us online on our website. We’ll be happy to share with you more detail about how this works. You may have a different title company you want to use, it doesn’t matter to us. We close through title for the protection of both parties, but we’re open to whatever title company that you prefer as long as they can close the sale. But anyway, thanks again for listening. I hope I answered some questions about remote closings and the role of technology in land sales. Thanks!