How to choose the best forms provider for your real estate business

Recent changes to the real estate forms ecosystem in Victoria and South Australia mean that now is a good time to review which property forms provider is best suited for your real estate business.

Both the REIV and REISA both recently ended relationships with their long-term forms providers, asking real estate businesses to adopt temporary and more manual solutions until they can match the functionality of their previous systems.

But such an approach commits real estate agents and property managers and their teams to additional workloads and administrative workarounds. That takes valuable time that could be better used listing, selling and managing property.

Here is a guide to choosing the best real estate forms provider:

1. Your real estate forms provider should be integrated with your CRM

When your forms provider is integrated with your CRM or property management system, you log in once and it all starts to work automatically. Information flows seamlessly from your records into your forms and vice versa. That means no need to switch constantly between tabs to look up details and retype, nor do you need to manually connect completed contracts and forms back to your CRM record. This results in significant time savings which really add up over a year.

If your forms provider isn’t integrated with your CRM, it’s you and your team that will have to work harder and longer.

2. Your real estate forms provider should have automations that save you time

Collecting information from clients to complete forms can take a lot of chasing if you're relying on emailing and manual techniques. But clever automations in quality forms platforms are designed to automatically populate fields, insert requests for signatures and notify you when action needs to be taken. These remove a lot of the manual processes and procedures, allowing forms to be progressively completed and alerting you when they are ready.

3. Your real estate forms provider should be affordable

Every real estate agent is currently overloaded with subscriptions so you need a provider with pricing that makes it easy and affordable to give everyone in your team access to all the features they need to do their jobs effortlessly.

Try to scrimp on licenses to save money and you may end up login sharing which is a serious cyber security risk.

Plus, ask yourself whether in addition to your subscription, you're also being asked to pay a membership fee. If the forms platform doesn't have full functionality, that's the equivalent to a loyalty tax. It all adds up.

4. Your real estate forms must be compliant with the latest regulations

When choosing a real estate forms provider make sure you know that the forms are compliant and reflect the latest regulations.

Best practice here is to understand the process that your provider follows to ensure their forms are always up to date as well as how forms updates will appear in their system.

A good forms provider will alert you to changes AND automatically update forms within their system so that it is impossible to use an incorrect version of the form once changes are made. A poor provider will alert you to changes and then expect you and your team to check you're using the right one. If you've got forms and contracts mid flight, it can quickly become easy to use the wrong one.

5. Your real estate forms provider should streamline your workflows not add complication or extra steps

Many tech providers think forms are easy. It's just a pdf that people fill in. Grab the old paper contract and just put it online. Right? Wrong. Getting forms absolutely right and making their workflow and the collection of the information needed to complete them truly simple and frictionless is an important speciality area. If forms are just an add on to a larger Proptech platform, you're getting second hand attention and the cost is that you and your team have to do more work. Your forms platform should be doing the heavy lifting for you. Not the other way around.

6. Your real estate forms provider should make it easy to deliver great service to clients

Buying, selling, renting and moving are stressful and difficult experiences. Your clients need all the help they can get. Good forms platforms make it easy for you and your team to deliver five star service through solutions that allow clients to sign forms, make offers, understand the process and move into their new home quickly by providing them with connection and utility services with just a few clicks. You should also be able to choose your connection provider.

7. Your real estate forms provider should be clear on who owns the data that is being collected

All data in real estate starts when an agent or property manager fills in a form. But even though you are the data collector, and forms owner, it is worth asking the question of who owns the data once it appears in the platform. Many providers sell it on to third parties in return for providing forms services to their members. You might be surprised about the answer.

Who can you trust?

Forms Live is the only forms provider that makes life easier for everyone in your team, includes hundreds of time-saving automations with major CRMs and Proptech providers and includes free electronic signatures for every user without expensive envelopes or memberships. At Forms Live our forms are updated across our platform as soon as new regulation changes come into effect. Plus, the data ownership remains with you. Where it should be.

Let us show you how easy it is with Forms Live. Contact our team for a demo and free trial.