Has anyone gone to paperless lease files? How did you do it?

Has anyone gone to paperless lease files? If so, pros/cons. Also how did you do it?

We are. The con for me is that I’m old school and like to review things in hand. Lease audits are daunting to me when you have to look at every file individually online.

They are great until you have to sell a building. Not much protocol has been established on file audits. Otherwise, love it.

Love that we went green! Less to file and sift/sort through and my file cabinets are thinning out!
We haven’t had the issue of our internet going down and needing paperwork yet (knock on wood!).

I am! Lease audits are definitely a drag but besides that I love having access to all my files from home or when I travel. Love not having a tonnnnnn or paperwork laying around. It keeps the whole office more organized. Have to have a methodical staff to keep it moving positively. We have one person on the team who loves scanning for the paperwork we do have (and we have a great scanner, the ScanSnap, which is a MUST for the success of my office) so she helps keep us moving in the right direction. What little paperwork we have, we scan, save, attach and then shred!

Bluemoon and ValenceDoc

Yes!!!! Love it!

We are paperless. Start with new move in’s and renewals. Have your leasing team scan 3-5 files a day. Con, making sure everybody labels files the same. If they don’t, files can be difficult to find. It will make an audit take longer too. It’s also harder to show the resident something in the lease. I also prefer looking at paper files at take over. Electronic file audit at due diligence is not the easiest.

We have been paperless for quite some time (close to 5 years). When we take over a new community, we convert their paper files within a few months. From a corporate perspective, it's nice to be able to support the onsite teams because if we have questions, we just look in Entrata. From an onsite perspective, there isn't constantly a stack of papers to file. Even our late notices are completely electronic where allowed.
We do have a process for due diligence and selling. I can't speak for other PMSs, but Entrata does have an easy way to export all to provide to the new owner. And I think they had an easyish way to import bc we imported them all from Yardi when we migrated.

Our teams still do a 100% lease audit annually and I think that it can be faster. Since we lock a lot down the lease should match the system and there should be fewer errors. If our CMs are reviewing every lease prior to counter signing AND prior to submitting bonuses, the lease audit should really have no errors and should go pretty quickly.

I could go on and on. I love how paperless we are!!

Yes, love it. No excuse for messy files, missing signatures. We use Realpage, Blue Moon and Docusign

We went paperless last year. I will say that it took a bit to get used to but now it’s really nice...until we have to do an audit. Working on that tomorrow/Thursday & it’ll take me & my assistant to do it thoroughly. But my residents (student prop) LOVE doing everything online & so do their parents

Also we use Entrata. It interfaces with our website. Runs very smoothly.

I actually hate it. I prefer doing electronic signatures but still printing out the lease for a file. My experience is there is a significantly more items that get missed during the process. I also feel on a takeover side of things, paper files are exceptionally easier to deal with. Just call me old school

We've been paperless for years. It's sooo much better for onsite staff. Yardi integrated with Blue moon for leases.

Way better, way easier, way less time consuming

Check out Valence Docs

Yes paperless for years...really great because the system will catch errors like missed initials, etc.
Epic customer experience as well bc they can read the paperwork in the convenience of their own place and submit at their convenience.
Always have a paper system back up in place Incase your internet goes down or your office gets slammed and people are waiting to sign leases electronically. You would just manually scan those leases into future resident doc mgnt folders so they end up being electronic (kind of) and you’d keep the hard copies in files. You won’t have a ton but maybe a handful for unique situations.
How: start with your renewals and all future leases start signing electronic leases. Eventually it all trues up.
Enjoy!

I have done this with several software providers and leases. I’m happy to discuss pros and cons. [email protected]

We just migrated to Entrata and our going paperless. It's a little difficult right now as mine and one other property are the only two on entrata right now. But its soooo much easier as far as lease signing and renewals go.

Pros less money on paper and copier useage, easier to audit , compliance issues are minimal, one can do remote audits really quickly, We have seen only positive results no negative issues at all.

What's paper?

Many have and we are close. But because our properties are LIHTC, we have to keep the original file. We upload them in our Yardi software and our compliance team can check them right away.

No cons at all! Lol

We’re in the process. I love it. Incredibly time saving. Imagine not having to print two leases, sign them both, wait for them to sign, then the time to scan it all in... praying to the scanner god that it doesn’t jam...
Just tap, tap, tap. It’s auto saved in Valance, save it In ResMan. Then on top of that, we’re about to be on Easy Lease with ResMan, so it will auto save there too... ah, the 21st century!

Love it. Everything we do is online. If we need a paper we upload to the residents account.

I loved it. PRO no filing cabinets, more space in the office. CON power/internet goes out, you have no way to look things up for a resident.

100%. Just picked a day, 2.5 years ago and it went into effect. After 2 years, we have a few old paper lease files, but slowly but surely they got scanned into the software, too. There is absolutely no con. Someone said something about no power, but I can pull up the lease or the management agreement from anywhere on my phone. Easy peasy.

Took over a property that had all of their files electronically. They left and shut down their systems without printing or providing copies. Actually had to sue for them.

Appfolio....everything is paperless and stored in the sytem....love it!