Real estate may be moving toward the paperless transaction, but, meanwhile, the industry is among the last to switch from legal-sized to letter-sized purchase agreements–despite the fact that most county recorders charge as much as double the price to process them.
Courts for years have refused to accept legal-sized motions, pleadings and other legal documents mostly due to the advent of the fax machine, says Jim McKinney, president of San Rafael, Calif.-based Professional Publishing, which is converting all of its real estate forms to letter size this summer.
Fax machines work more efficiently with standard-size paper and when courts began allowing the use of faxed documents, the fate of the longer forms was sealed, McKinney explained.
To file legal-sized documents, clerks have to shrink them and in the case of faxed documents, that can make signatures illegible and thus questionable.
One reason the real estate industry may be stuck on the long form is that many state realty associations print their own forms, a lucrative business in some cases, McKinney said. The California Association of Realtors, for example, nets about $5 million a year on the sale of real estate forms to its members, according to McKinney.
Also, McKinney said, real estate agents like longer forms because it makes for fewer pages for clients to review and sign. Letter-sized forms usually add two extra pages to a standard real estate document.
Nevertheless, the long form may be on its way out. McKinney’s firm, the largest private publisher of real estate forms outside realty associations, decided to make the switch at the request of its Forms Committee, a group of real estate managers and brokers that acts as a kind of focus group for the company.
In addition, various states are looking at converting to letter-sized forms, too. In Ohio, for example, where form size is controlled by the state’s Division of Real Estate, the Ohio Association of Realtors is actively lobbying to convert to the shorter forms, according to the group’s Janice Johnston.
McKinney’s firm is planning to aggressively market its new letter-sized forms.
In addition, it has signed an agreement with Boulder, Colo.-based Formulator Software to make the new forms available for Windows users on disk or to download off the Internet.
