How do I send a document to be signed remotely?

Open a contract generated from one of your templates and choose to send it for signature. It is part of Pro, the same as signing in person, and it is how a seller in another country, a landlord who will not come in or a co-broke agent signs the same document as the person sitting across your desk.

Sending it

Give each party a name, an email address and a role — agent, buyer, seller, tenant, landlord or witness. Up to ten parties go on one send, and each is emailed separately with a link of their own. The email is sent from Housing Market CRM, names you as the person who sent it, and is written in your language.

Only a contract can be sent. An uploaded file in the document vault cannot: signing binds a signature to the text of the document, and a file we did not generate has no text we can bind to.

What the signer does

They open the link, read the contract, and either draw a signature with a finger, a stylus or a mouse, or type their name and have it written out. Either way the same picture is stored. They can also decline — "I will not sign" — with a reason if they want to give one, and a decline is kept rather than deleted.

There is no account, no password and no code to enter. Holding the link is what authorises the signature, which is exactly what the link is for and also its limit — see the last section.

A link lasts fourteen days, can be used once, and is for one document and one signer. You can withdraw it before then. Every party can sign at any time and in any order; the order you listed them in is kept as a record of your intent and nothing holds anyone back.

It is bound to the text they were shown

The signature is tied to the exact wording on the screen at the moment of signing. If the contract was edited after the link went out, signing is refused and the signer is told the document changed rather than being left clicking a link that looks broken. The first signature locks the text, so everybody signs the same document.

A signed contract is never deleted, and neither is a document that has been sent for signature — it can be archived.

Following it up, and the record you can keep

Each party shows as sent and not yet opened, opened and not yet signed, signed, declined, expired, or withdrawn. The CRM records when the link was first opened, once, rather than every time — a row per read would be a browsing log of somebody who is not your customer. Nothing chases them: there are no reminder emails, and sending again is a deliberate act.

A signature record can be downloaded for a signed contract. It reproduces the contract, and for each signature gives the name, the role, the email address, whether it was signed remotely or in person, the time in UTC, the network address it came from, the browser, and a digest of the text that was signed. It also lists anybody who was asked and has not signed.

What it proves, and what it does not

It shows that somebody with access to that email address signed, at that time, against that wording. It does not show who they are. No identity document is checked, no identity is verified, and nobody witnesses the signing.

The signing is ours end to end, on our own infrastructure, and there is no outside party involved: no third-party certificate, no external timestamp, and nothing an authority anywhere recognises as more than our own record. Housing Market Group states the facts it recorded and does not tell you what those facts mean under any country's law — that is a question for your own adviser, and it is worth asking before you rely on this for something that matters.

Signing in person on your own device is unchanged and works the same way. See "How do documents, contracts and leases work?".