Commit To Your Dream Home: A GitHub-Inspired Platform for Streamlining Real Estate Transactions
In a picture-perfect world, purchasing your dream home is a relaxing experience. The reality is far from this dream, however: new home buyers are faced with a nightmare of paperwork, negotiations, and endless email chains. The archaic home-buying process drains the joy out of what should be an exciting moment. Enter PaperTrail, an application to manage real estate negotiations and reclaim the excitement of home buying and selling.
One of the most important decisions any of us will make is selecting and purchasing a house. To buy a property, all parties involved need to jump through a series of (complicated and often drawn-out) steps: bid and negotiate an offer, sign a purchase agreement, issue property disclosures, oversee home inspection and subsequent report, negotiate results of the inspection, secure mortgage financing, appraise the house, obtain a title search report, obtain homeowner’s insurance, closing statement, and final deed of sale. Not only are there (potentially) dozens of documents, but as the buyer and seller negotiate, each document may have dozens of versions — all before it is signed!
The Problem
Needless to say, for new homeowners and first-time sellers, the process is daunting. Also, while lawyers and realtors are familiar with this procedure, they too can have trouble 1) locating documents, 2) tracking changes between different versions of documents, 3) quickly understanding what each (sometimes obscure) document actually says, 4) commenting precisely on specific document versions, and 5) maintaining a set of standard timelines.
Today, most organization and communication is via email. The onus is on each agent or lawyer to “redline” (or highlight) what they have changed as versions are sent back and forth during negotiation. Often, parties forget to highlight all changes, people drop from the email list, the chain snowballs into an unruly thread, versions are lost, and comments seem to disappear into thin air.
Our Solution
PaperTrail is a solution for many of the problems inherent in real estate negotiations. After interviewing realtors, hearing from mentors who have recently bought real estate, and contemplating our own experiences signing leases in Hanover, NH, we are motivated to lessen the load on all parties involved. Through countless hours of research, design iterations, and real-world testing, we’ve crafted an application that solves these headaches.
We were inspired by GitHub, a platform for software development that streamlines collaboration, version control, and code sharing among developers. GitHub’s core functionality allows for detailed tracking of each change made to code, facilitates discussion and reviews, and manages projects with an efficiency that reduces the potential for error. By leveraging GitHub’s principles of sharing and versioning, we tailored them to meet the unique challenges of real estate documents. Specifically, we allow parties to issue new document versions and track changes. PaperTrail also allows stakeholders to propose, discuss, and approve new changes while pinpointing concerns swiftly, which fosters collaborative negotiations that are integral to successful real estate deals.
Our application organizes a deal into a shared project folder. In addition to providing a project timeline to track shared tasks, each project is composed of documents (e.g., “Closing Statement”), and each individual document has several versions until it is signed off — another functionality of our tool. This allows your group to have an organized, intuitive central location for all the documents you’ll need throughout the process.
Each Project will have several documents. Each document has a version history kept in a folder, which allows you to intuitively look through all different contract versions as you progress through a negotiation. Users from any party can upload new versions — but members of other parties won’t be able to see these until everyone from the initial party has approved the new iteration. In this way, the tool is sensitive to both inter- and intra-party collaboration.
Users can then view an AI summarization of a document version, see potential legal red flags generated by AI, and comment publicly (all parties can see) or privately (only their own party can see) on specific aspects they’d like to change. Additionally, they can track changes between different document versions seamlessly with our “Version Diff” tool.
There are a myriad of systems that technology has recently overhauled — healthcare, education, and finance, to name a few. Real estate transactions are one key process left behind — until now.
Impact & Validation
We have tested our application with industry professionals, in which we were able to identify the key features that will help professionals in a real-world setting. During these tests, we asked professionals to navigate through a mock transaction using our tool, and our feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. We’ve also asked our peers and families to navigate through the application. Many of those who have bought/sold real estate reported that PaperTrail would have significantly reduced time spent on document management, length of negotiation, and overall stress levels as they bought or sold a property. By listening to our users and obtaining feedback, we aim to continually advance our product.
In summary, buying a house can turn into a logistical nightmare — fraught with endless paperwork and confusing negotiations that can dampen the excitement of stepping into a new chapter of life. But, purchasing or selling a home should be an exciting, enjoyable experience! Let’s transform homeownership from a stress-inducing burden to a clear and exciting process.
About the Team
Our team is comprised of five Dartmouth students passionate about building and leveraging technology to transform complex, real-life challenges into manageable and streamlined processes. You can reach out to us at papertrailapplication@gmail.com.
Thanks for taking the time to get to know our product, and feel free to try it out at https://www.paper-trail.me. If you have any questions, concerns, thoughts, or feedback, we’d love to hear from you!
