Detailed leases are an essential part of the rental business. While you need to spend time and care making sure that you cover all your bases in your lease agreements, in this article, we’re going to be focusing on the next step: getting your lease signed.
After drafting your lease, you need to get it signed by the tenant, give them a copy, and make sure that the document is stored in a safe, easily accessible place. Traditionally, this was all done offline, which meant emailing or calling your tenant to set up a meeting, giving them a chance to review the lease, and scheduling a time and place for them to sign it in person. It was a long process.
In the age of the internet, property management software allows you to accomplish this entire process digitally, making things so much easier for everyone.
In case you haven’t yet made the switch from physical to digital leases, here are 5 of the benefits of signing leases online:
Save Time
As discussed above, physically signing leases is a time-consuming endeavor. After you finish drafting the lease, you must email it to your tenant, wait for them to review it, print it out, schedule a time for the tenant to come in and sign it, scan the lease once they have signed it, and provide them with a physical copy. And this process takes even more time if you’re waiting on the postal service.
Signing online, on the other hand, allows tenants to review and sign the lease as soon as you finish drafting it and send it to them electronically. You skip all the emails, phone calls, scheduling, in-person meetings, and printing. Furthermore, most property management software platforms provide you with lease templates that enable you to create the lease much faster than if you were to do it manually.
Save Money
Time is money. The faster you’re able to get the lease signed, the sooner the tenant will be able to move in, and the sooner you can begin collecting rent. And with the amount of time you’ll save during the lease-signing process, you’ll be able to focus on other important tasks that require your attention, which will increase your business’s productivity.
Let’s also not forget that printing and mailing back and forth costs money. And these costs can especially add up when you have more tenants.
Increased Security
Paper copies of your leases run the risk of being lost or misplaced. Given the important role these documents play in your rental management, and considering the sensitive information about you and your tenants that these documents can contain, you want to avoid this from happening at all costs.
Leases housed online have encryption and audit trail protection, which makes them secure and easy to access. If you’re worried about how legally enforceable electronic signatures are — don’t be. Thanks to the ESIGN Act, they’re completely valid and fully recognized by the US government.
Minimize Human Error
When signing hardcopy leases in person, there’s always the possibility that someone misses a signature, date, or set of initials. If you’re lucky and catch it in time, you’ll still have to schedule another meeting so that the missing fields can be filled out.
With online leasing, this problem is nonexistent. Most digital signing platforms don’t allow a document to be submitted if any of the fields that need to be filled are empty. And because the documents are stored online, you don’t have to worry about misplacing or losing a document.
Environmentally Friendly
Lease agreements can be long, sometimes over 20 pages. And because you and your tenant both need a copy of the lease, that means at least double the number of pages. With multiple units and tenants, this can add up to a lot of paper.
Online leasing eliminates the need for paper. Not only is it more economical, but it’s more environmentally friendly, and in today’s day and age, it’s important to make sure that we’re looking out for the planet when we can.
Conclusion
If you were uncertain as to whether signing leases online would help your business, hopefully that uncertainty has gone away after reading this article. With all the benefits that digital lease signing offers, there shouldn’t be any reason to question making the switch.
