Let’s face it, trying to get accurate data from deeds, contracts or legal descriptions continues to hobble the real estate industry, with inaccuracies still abounding. It’s also time consuming and, at times, even mind-numbing for staffers who’d be better utilized facilitating closings or generating marketing leads.
Although an increasing percentage of recorded real estate documents are electronic, we continue to build out the title report in many cases from historical documents, often from scanned images and in the more remote counties, from the original recorded documents.
How to transform this historical and necessary information into an electronic and usable format is the task at hand for most real estate companies.
The manual challenges
Handwritten notes
A host of real estate legal documents carry handwritten notes. True story. A homebuyer comes to closing and finds that on every single document, her last name is misspelled. In addition to signing the documents, she had to initial everywhere she signed, in acknowledgement of the misspelling.
The more complicated issues concern longer handwritten instructions or changes that pepper real estate contracts. Abstractors deal with these anomalies every day.
Fuzzy images
While optical character imaging (OCR) has come a long way, the poor quality of many scanned images has resulted in the corruption of data translated to an electronic platform. Companies not only have to capture data, but they also have to validate it, and that often puts it back into an expensive and time-consuming manual process.
Signature comparison
And finally for all time, contracts, deeds, and mortgage documents have been considered legal exclusively with a wet signature. And while that is changing with remote online notarization and the move to eMortgages, legacy documents are still a fundamental part of the system. Verifying signatures is still very much a part of the title and escrow process.
The automated solutions
Real estate companies increasingly are turning to automated data capture and analysis to increase accuracy and reduce manual processes. The reason? Manual processes are slow and human error is inevitable.
From scanning incoming documents for images and other pre-determined anomalies to classifying and routing for further data capture, artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotic process automation are making a difference for companies dedicated to cleaning up, managing and capitalizing on data in the real estate process.
From optical character recognition to data extraction to document classification, these processes can speed up document management for an industry that has always struggled with the sheer volume of materials in play.
For any agency owner hesitant to take the plunge, know that the true genius of RPA is its scalability. Smaller enterprises may think RPA is only for the big data managers, but it is easily scaled down to almost any size operation and can provide savings no matter the level of complexity of your tech stack.
Contact us s today to learn more about how RPA can significantly improve your workflow in 2023. info@truefocusautomation.com
Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash
