“The Savings In My Copy Bill By Itself Pay For Paperless Pipeline”

In the latest webinar we held, 1 user shared how she implemented and uses Paperless Pipeline.

(For those curious, she has a 29 agent office.)

She started by saying…

Here’s what’s happened

It’s made life easier for the agents, saved agents paper and money. Especially the short sale agents. They shred their paperwork now, don’t have to lug it around anymore.

My copy and paper bills have gone down tremendously:

  • Copy bills used to be $300 to $500 per month, last month bill was $150.
  • That does not include savings on paper or the lease on the copier/printer.
  • It’s nice to gain extra space in our storage room (and use it for more agents).
  • We were busting out of our storage rooms.
  • Now we are shredding things.
  • Growing office revenue does not have to mean buying a bigger office. I love it!

How we use it

Check out our paperless_pipeline_instructions we give the agents.

  1. We have the agent create transactions and upload docs, instead of staff (staff loves this, and so do agents)
  2. Agents emails staff letting them know transaction was created.
  3. Staff goes in and enters the data into MLS.(Extra tidbit: Mandy uses Quickbooks for accounting)

For Turning in paperwork…

We programmed each individual agents maildrop address into the scanner.

So it works like this: An agent goes to the scanner, scans the contract to their name programmed into the scanner. And it goes directly into Paperless Pipeline under that agent!

Why Pipeline rocks

Now that the Agent makes the file, staff doesn’t have to get out a manilla folder (cost savings), and put it in the filing cabinet. This saves staff at least 5 minutes per file.

At roughly 100 files per month, that’s 500 minutes per month saved. At $15 per hour, that’s $125 saved in labor expense (per month)simply by having agents create the transaction files. (Note: 5 minutes per file is conservative)

Before we had Pipeline… Agents would hand docs to the front desk and it would sit there for weeks if it was incomplete. Now an agent turns the paperwork into pipeline and staff doesn’t work it until it’s complete. It’s near instant now. As opposed to weeks waiting for the (complete) paperwork.

How we implemented it

I went slowly. It was about 60 days of a relaxed implementation. The first month, I added my own transactions to get comfortable with it… (around 25 transactions)

After I liked that… I had staff add agents current listings and pendings into the system for the agents. We went agent by agent and added all of each agents pendings, and then listings, in that order. To make it easy to implement current listings and current pendings, We would scan the complete listing or pending file, instead of splitting file into multiple docs. After we implemented the current listings/pendings, we let agents create their new listings and pending’s themselves.

Every other week we have a class, plug a computer into the TV, go through my account and just click around and answer questions. Training is half done by itself because the system is so simple to use. I’ve had 1 agent out of 29 resist the change, which surprised me.

The response from agents

In the initial launch I didn’t hear an overwhelming majority response of either good or bad. Which is a good thing. They accepted it!

And then after using it, they started to really like it. (This is usually backwards, as agents use software they grow to NOT like it.)

Every week I show a new feature that’s released (because they always release new features), and agents continue to fall in love with the system.