PDFelement Whitepaper. How Real Estate Professionals can exploit PDF Editors to create secure Digital Signatures and Untamperable e-contracts

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1 How Real Estate Professionals can exploit PDF Editors to create secure Digital Signatures and Untamperable e-contracts 1

2 Use a PDF solution to create virtual transaction opportunities and vastly speed up your If you re a Real Estate professional, your daily transactions can involve stacks of redundant, insecure and wasteful paperwork, passed between countless stakeholders: i.e., real estate agents, brokers, clients, escrow officers, mortgage brokers, attorneys, and more. Many real estate agents, as a result, make the switch to electronic documents and digital signatures. This saves time and money. But it has also raised concerns over legal recognition of those signatures and the potential for stakeholders to tamper with electronic contracts after signing. A full-featured, professional PDF editor should put these concerns to rest. Indeed, with PDFelement, you can apply legally binding, certified e-signatures; and secure your digital contracts with 256-bit encryption to lock out unauthorized editing and printing. As the cherry on top of the sundae, your sales and marketing teams will also benefit immensely from having PDF conversion, collation and creation tools to remix and create professional-looking sales copy and presentations. Not all PDF solutions are built and priced the same, however, so it s important to know the difference to get the best ROI on your software expenditure. Six Reasons why Real Estate Professionals are Choosing PDFelement over Adobe Acrobat Worry-free, Flexible Licensing Simple and Flexible volume license discounts without any auditing and legal obligations. Scalable and Customizable Our team will help you integrate our software and customize it to meet the unique demands of your work environment. Simple Microsoft Word-like Interface A deliberately minimalistic, easy-to-use interface with clear & simple prompts to get you started. If you ve used Microsoft Word, you ll have no trouble adapting to PDFelement. An Affordable Cross-platform PDF Solution PDFelement is the only other PDF editor, besides Adobe, to have versions for Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac and ios users. So you ll always have affordable PDF tools at your fingertips. Edit, sign and send PDF forms anytime, anywhere. 2

3 We ve got your back Purchasing our software entitles you to full customer support. PDFelement also comes with countless free tutorials, webinars and how-to articles so you can accelerate the value of your software. Zero Price Shock No subscription costs that pile up over time or big down payments. Get all the features you need at a single reasonable price. PDFelement, the most affordable cross-platform PDF alternative, available on Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac and mobile ios. PDFelement is less than x3 the cost of Adobe Acrobat, the only other cross-platform PDF solution. $69.95 gets you all the basic edit and convert features and more; plus full customer support and regular product updates. With almost the same basic functionalities (and many more you don t need) Adobe acrobat will cost you $ or up to $24.99 per month, every month. Our business customers can equip 500 licenses of PDFelement for the same price as 200 Acrobat licenses. You pay once and retain access to as many copies as you ve bought for life -- no strings. In their guide to Surviving an Adobe Software License Audit, Gartner Research reports that Adobe has audited a higher proportion of its customers than other vendors with similar revenue. Penalties for non-compliance include extra fees or termination of service! 3

4 How Real Estate Agents stand to benefit from a Compact PDF Editor According to a 2013 Member Profile by the US National Association of Realtors, 90% of members use electronic content and forms; another 50% use an e-sign tool. However, the report added, those who used such tools expressed concern over the legal validity of e-signatures; as well as concerns that stakeholders might later tamper with electronic contracts using a downloaded PDF editor. A good, affordable PDF solution is proven to improve the security and speed at which you make transactions, putting these concerns to rest. Digital Signatures: Real Estate Agents can use e-signature tools to manage their own side of the transaction, and present clients with legally binding pre-signed documents. According to the US esign act, and similar legislation in Canada, digital signatures are binding for almost every day-to-day authorization, except for critical, high-stakes documents, like property transfers, wills, and so on. To create a signature with PDFelement, navigate to the Protect Menu, open it, and click sign document, then click and draw the area you want to sign. After that, just follow the prompts. PDFelement will allow you to create or import your own Certificate-based digital ID. That way, Recipients will be able to verify the PDF file you ve signed is authentic. Other Security and Privacy Features a) Exploit 256-bit encryption to create nearly unhackable, password-protected documents, with customizable restrictions on printing and editing. Prevent stakeholders from tampering with documents post-signature. b) Permanently black out text with redaction tools to ensure client privacy in sensitive documents. 4

5 PDFelement for your Marketing and Sales Teams In addition to securing and speeding your transactions, PDFelement will be of great benefit to your sales and marketing teams: Powerful Collation: With the ability to combine up to 300+ file types into a single cohesive PDF, your marketing team will benefit by being able to quickly create and combine collateral material such as Press Kits, Catalogs and Presentations. In turn, these complex documents can be more easily sent over as PDFs Remix Documents and Exploit OCR for easy information extraction: Likewise, your sales team will benefit from using PDF editing tools to remix documents and combine existing files. With Optical Character Recognition (OCR), they ll be able to transform static images such as scanned documents and photos into editable, searchable and selectable documents, enabling easy copy-and-paste extraction of informatio What the Average Knowledge Worker needs, yet struggles to find, in a PDF editor To get the productivity gains to be had from PDF software, your knowledge workers will, at minimum, require the tools to edit and create PDFs -- not just view them. But many PDF solutions on the market suffer cost-, file-size and feature-bloat. Elaborate menus and exhaustive feature sets make navigation annoying, sapping time which could be better spent creating. In addition, Adobe Acrobat and similar products include many tools, such as 3D PDF editors, which your average information worker will never use. Acrobat s Feature set is so huge that you could probably spend a week exploring its menus and still miss some options PC Mag s Review of Acrobat XI Other obstacles thrown up by vendors include heavy subscription prices that pile up over time; complicated licensing and intrusive auditing policies; and limited customer support. 5

6 The Bottom Line Equip your team with an affordable legal solution that meets all your PDF needs PDFelement offers a light-weight product built and priced for your average knowledge worker. You ll have everything you need to edit, create, convert, sign and combine PDFs -- across Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac and mobile ios -- without the frustration and worry of other PDF alternatives. With PDFelement s encryption and security tools, you can also be sure your electronic authorizations are safe and legally binding. Wondershare is a recognized member of the PDF Association, an international body of PDF industry leaders dedicated to the global standardization and advancement of PDF technology. pdfa.org Works Cited McKinsey Report The 8 Most Popular Document Formats on the Web. DuffJohnson Strategy and Communications, Feb com/2014/02/17/the-8-most-popular-document-formats-on-theweb/ Nick Geddes, "Turning Documents into Data: using data capture to improve document processing," AIIM, downloads/wpturningdocumentintodata.pdf Xerox 81% of Digital Signature users have seen payback within one 12-month budget cycle. (AIIM, Digital Signatures, 2012). 50% of Scan-and-Capture technology adopters report payback of their investment within 12 onths or less; two-thirds report a payback in