Mar 21, 2016

E-signing in FAST2 makes lease management easier

FAST2 is the market leader in business systems for municipal housing companies in Sweden and is now also growing in the private sector. FAST2 is also one of Egreement's partners in the real estate market and sees great efficiency gains for its customers when they start e-signing.

Henrik Smidskog, Sales and Marketing Manager at FAST2, explains that FAST2 is a holistic system that covers all the main business processes in a real estate company - management, letting and rental administration. It is an advantage that everything is managed in the same system and that the user can see all aspects of both their client and their rental property directly when viewing the client in the system.

FAST2 has estimated that a digital business process can reduce the administration around renting by up to 90%, especially in the later part of the process where paper has to be printed, sent, signed, archived. This is where e-signing comes in.

E-signature brings efficiency at the very end of the contracting process. It makes it easier for both the property management company and the tenant to sign the contract, while reducing paperwork, simplifying filing and cutting postage costs. Smidskog estimates that larger real estate companies can probably recoup the investment quickly just by reducing printing and postage.

Student housing in Linköping opened for e-signing in the summer of 2014, when many apartments were to be rented out as new students moved in. It was a success! Henrik explains that they had feared that customers (students) would find e-signature cumbersome, but it turned out to be just the opposite. Many students preferred e-signing.

Today, the solution is used by many of FAST2's customers and they see opportunities to start using e-signature in more contexts. For example, the process could be simplified when signing for parking spaces or for the receipt of a final inspection. In these cases, the protocol is currently required to be signed by hand, but why not upload the contract on the web and sign it electronically?

Smidskog elaborates: "For our customers, it would save a lot of money in administration. 1000s of parking spaces are handled every year and property owners are looking for more efficient management. E-signing could clearly help to reduce both the actual cost and the time spent on administration. We have a few customers who have already started and it's working great!"

Henrik Smidskog doesn't really see any limitations in the type of contracts that could be e-signed. In the longer term, it is conceivable that even the lease itself will be signed electronically. For FAST2, the vision is clear: for truly efficient administration of contracts around our housing, we are moving towards a fully digital process.