Going Paperless – You Are or You’re Not-It’s that Simple

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Commentary by Joe Kazzoun

RISMEDIA, Sept. 24, 2008-Taking your business paperless, or as close to it as you can get today, is about one thing-commitment. You’re either going to do it or you’re not. The companies I’ve worked with that have made a transition quickly and successfully have done so for one simple reason: they decided to do it and moved forward.

Most brokerages know the benefits-increased efficiency, reduced costs, more professional service delivery, risk mitigation, etc. However, most are not certain of how to get to a “paperless world” and whether it is reasonably possible.

How you get there can be answered easily-pick an experienced, established vendor that will provide you the support you need to make the transition. Your vendor should not only know its product, but should have proven experience at consulting with and moving brokerages through the process.

It’s less about the technology than it is about changing the business processes and defining how you will step through the transition. At Instanet Solutions, for example, we keep it simple and use the mantra-crawl, walk, run. We phase the project into easy steps that make it as easy and painless as possible. And, because the system is flexible, we don’t force you to re-engineer your business. That said, most brokers find many ways to improve their business as they move through the planning and implementation process.

Brokers that make the transition successfully do simple things. For example, some brokers tell their agents, “You can no longer hand out paper to the staff. If you don’t have it electronically, fax it into the online system using the fax cover sheets the staff will provide you.”

The cover sheet routes the documents and the staff (and agent) receive the documents as PDF files. Virtually every sales associate already knows how to use a fax machine, and those who are more advanced will use all the other great features of the system that make moving paperless easy.

More and more brokerages are making the move every month. With systems like our DocBox^TM, an online document management and Internet faxing platform, there is no equipment to buy, no capital investments to make and no big setup fee. In short, there is a very low barrier to entry. All a company needs is its existing Internet access, PCs and the will to move forward

We have one brokerage client of nearly 900 sales associates-RE/MAX Alliance in Colorado-that took its business virtually paperless in about three months. They’ve decreased costs, improved efficiency and provided a valuable service (read: retention tool!) to their sales associates. They made the transition easy by using the fax-to-PDF feature and are faxing about 90,000 pages a month into our system.

Why were they able to do this so quickly? They made the choice to move forward and they just did it.

Joe Kazzoun is vice president of business and product development for Instanet Solutions.

For more information, please visit www.instanetsolutions.com.

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For more ways real estate professionals are taking their businesses green, see:

• 6 Ways to Master the Green Message
  Real Estate Business Model – by Accident, Virtually Green  
  50 Days of Leaders: Greening Real Estate