Is Docusign Leading the Real Estate Comeback?

For the last two years or so, electronic signatures on real estate forms through platforms such as Docusign have gone from non-existent to fringe to the norm.  These forms are widely accepted for offer purposes and only in certain cases are denied by lenders, in which case, hand signatures must be suppied at some point, normally after the offer is accepted.  Their ease of use and paperlessness makes it so easy to submit an offer, with less guilt of killing trees, when the old process which involved old-fashioned face-to-face interation or printing/scanning is quite a bit more of a hassle for all involved.

Lately, my clients and I have been astounded by the number of offers that have been received on some listed properties.  Granted, inventory is extremely low across the board and sometimes list prices are obscenely low, but in the past few weeks, I have been involved in several scenarios where a short sale received over 40 offers or other listings received more than 10 offers on a few occasions.   Admittedly, in the Docusign era, I have written more than one offer on the same day from the same client to be submitted on different properties, however this didn’t happen quite so much in the pre-Docusign days.  It begs the question, is the ease of making and submitting offers now leading to more offers, creating extra competition, and driving up prices faster than when this process was a more time and resource consuming task?

My belief is that is that it probably is increasing the speed of the correction from the overcorrection.  It is not going to bring prices back to unsustainable levels as long as underwriting guidelines remain prudent, but if the answer truly is “yes”, then Docusign and other technologies may be more responsible for returning home equity to owners and reducing write-offs for banks than the Fed and President combined.