BLOG VIEW: There are lots of great reasons for mortgage lenders to adopt the e-mortgage, but one huge benefit that sometimes gets overlooked is the tremendous savings on paper.
According to recent research conducted by e-signature technology firm SIGNiX, a single paper-based real estate transaction, starting with going to contract with an agent through closing, uses at least 1,285 sheets of paper.
Should home sales reach 5.9 million this year, as forecast, it would take 7.5 billion sheets of paper to complete all of those transactions, if they were 100% paper-based, a new infographic from SIGNiX shows.
What’s more, today it costs more than $2,500 for printing, filing, faxing, scanning and mailing all of the real estate- and mortgage-related documents involved in a single home sale, including the manual labor involved in all of that paper pushing.
As the infographic illustrates, because paper-based processes are largely manual, the amount of filing and data entry (and re-entry) involved means that today, it takes an average of 40 days to process a traditional, paper-based mortgage from origination to closing. It is the manual aspect of paper-based processes that makes them so time-consuming and expensive.
In fact, to originate, print, fax, scan, file and mail documents for the forecast 5.9 million home sales expected this year, the industry would shell out more than $14.8 billion – if they were all paper-based processes.
To put this in another perspective, if all of those same transactions were completely digital, end to end, and no sheets of paper were used, it would save more than 900,000 trees per year – thus making the Lorax very happy!
To check out the infographic, click here.
