I was sitting with my clients at the title company last week, along with the escrow officer and the lender. It was a very friendly, relaxed signing, and everything was going smoothly. We started to talk about the amount of paperwork needed to close an escrow. This closing package was relatively small by industry standards, since there was only one loan involved. Second loans require an additional set of documents, and government loans, even more. Some of the worse offenders are condo sales, with their big pile of disclosures and CC&R's.
Years ago, we thought that the computer would free us from these piles of paper. I remember seeing a futuristic film at a Realtors' Convention that showed the buyers coming to a house with their agent, accessing a touch tone screen that brought up the sellers and their agent in a three-way video call, and pressing a few buttons to confirm a sale.
No such luck. We have more paperwork than ever. The documents required to take a listing or write an offer increase every year. We do have online disclosures, but all that means is that the selling agent prints them out instead of the listing agent. The pile of paper remains the same, and our recycling bins fill up quickly.
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