Why property deals stall on paperwork
A property transaction is a relay race of signatures. The buyer signs an offer, the seller accepts, both agents sign, and then the addenda start. A lease needs the tenant, often a co-tenant or guarantor, and the landlord or managing agent. Every one of those people is busy, often travelling, and rarely near a printer at the moment you need them. A deal that is agreed on Friday can sit unsigned until Wednesday for no better reason than logistics.
SignPe takes logistics out of it. Upload the contract, place a signature field for each party, choose who signs in which order and send. Everyone signs on the device in their pocket. You see each person’s status move from Sent to Opened to Signed, and the moment the last signature lands, every party receives the completed PDF.
Property purchase agreements
Sales contracts, offers, counter-offers and closing documents usually involve the most signers and the most pages. A few SignPe features matter most here:
- Set signer order so the buyer signs the offer first and the seller accepts second, with each agent after. Out-of-turn signers see “Waiting for <name> to sign”, and the next person gets an “it’s your turn” email automatically.
- Initials on every page with Apply to all fields of the same type, so a buyer initials a long contract once rather than thirty times.
- Date fields in the format your contracts use, from DD/MM/YYYY to “MMMM DD, YYYY”, so every signature carries a consistent date.
- Text and Checkmark fields for the offer price, possession date or the contingencies a buyer is accepting.
Unlimited pages and unlimited signers apply on every document, including the free ones. Joint buyers, a power-of-attorney holder and both agents are all just signers on one document. For India, Aadhaar eSign adds OTP verification through eMudhra and a PKI-signed PDF — check with the parties’ advisers which property documents need registration or wet ink under local rules, and read the legality guide.
Lease agreement signing and tenant onboarding
Rental agreements are where e-signature saves the most time, because they repeat. Prepare the lease once, place the tenant’s, co-tenant’s and landlord’s fields, and send. Tenants sign as guests from the email — they accept an electronic-records consent screen and sign, without creating an account. For a step-by-step walkthrough, read how to fill and sign a lease agreement online.
- Onboarding paperwork — the tenancy application, house rules acknowledgement and inventory can each go out as their own document.
- Photos from the tenant — ID or a move-in condition report can come in as JPG or PNG. Several photos combine into one PDF automatically.
- Move-in day — use In person Signing to hand your tablet to the tenant during the key handover and get the inventory signed on the spot.
- Renewals — when terms change, void the old renewal so it can’t be signed, then send the updated one.
Scanning a lease that was signed on paper
On the SignPe mobile app, Scan uses your phone’s document scanner with automatic edge detection, up to 20 pages per scan, and turns a paper lease into a clean PDF you can send on for countersignature.
Real estate broker contracts
Listing agreements, commission agreements and co-broking arrangements are signed between professionals, and they often need doing between viewings. Agents can save their signature, initials and the brokerage’s stamp in My Signatures and apply them in a tap, and the SignPe apps for iOS and Android mean a listing agreement can be sent and countersigned from the car park.
Copy your principal broker or office manager on each contract as an observer, so they see progress without being asked to sign. If an agent is on leave, delegation lets them hand their signing to a colleague in the same organisation, who can sign on their behalf. The delegate is notified.
Property management documents
Behind every managed property is a steady flow of smaller agreements: maintenance contracts, vendor and contractor agreements, work orders, owner authorisations and notices. None of them is complicated, but together they are a lot to chase. Use the Documents list filters — Draft, Action Required, Waiting for Others and Signed — to see at a glance which are still out, and press Remind to email every signer who hasn’t signed yet.
Vendors can send you their own contracts too. Import a file directly from Google Drive, OneDrive, Box or Dropbox, place your signature and return it, without downloading and re-uploading. See cloud storage integration.
Paper signing versus SignPe
| Step | On paper | With SignPe |
|---|---|---|
| Getting the contract to a buyer abroad | Courier or print-sign-scan | An email link they open on their phone |
| Making sure parties sign in sequence | Hand-carry the original between offices | Set signer order; each person is emailed in turn |
| Finding out who has not signed | Phone round every party | Per-signer status in your Documents list |
| Chasing a slow signer | Write another email | Press Remind |
| Withdrawing an outdated offer | Ask everyone to ignore it | Void it — the link stops working |
| Proving when each party signed | Handwritten dates, if any | Audit trail PDF with emailed, viewed and signed times |
The difference compounds across a busy month. Each contract that closes in an afternoon rather than a week is a buyer who doesn’t get cold feet and a tenant who moves in on time. You can try it on your next lease with the free plan: three real documents, unlimited pages and signers, no credit card.
A typical lease signing workflow
Upload the lease
Upload the lease as a PDF or Word file, or scan it on your phone. Files can be up to 20 MB.
Place the fields
Add Signature, Initials, Full Name and Date fields for the tenant and co-tenant, and the landlord’s Signature and Stamp at the end.
Set the order
Choose Set signer order so tenants sign before the landlord countersigns. Add the property manager as an observer.
Send and track
Tenants get a Review & Sign Document email. Watch the status in Waiting for Others and send a reminder if anyone stalls.
Keep the record
When the landlord signs, everyone receives the signed lease. Download the audit trail and keep it with the tenancy file.
Legal and record-keeping considerations
Electronic signatures are recognised under the US ESIGN Act and UETA, the EU’s eIDAS regulation and India’s IT Act 2000, and leases, listing agreements and many sales documents are routinely signed electronically. Transfer deeds and documents that must be registered or notarised can have their own requirements, which vary by country and state — confirm those with a property lawyer before relying on e-signature for them.
For everything you do sign in SignPe, the audit trail PDF records the document ID, sent and completed dates, and when each signer was emailed, viewed and signed. Documents are protected by HTTPS/TLS, AES-256-encrypted API payloads and encrypted storage, and only the document’s participants can open it.
