NAR invests in DocuSign
Venture capital fund takes stake in e-signatures firm
By Inman News, Monday, November 16, 2009.The National Association of Realtors' venture capital fund, Second Century Ventures LLC, has made an undisclosed "strategic investment" in electronic signature services provider DocuSign.
NAR Chief Executive Officer Dale Stinton -- who also serves as president of Second City Ventures -- will join DocuSign's board of directors.
More than 18,000 real estate professionals have used DocuSign's electronic signature services, the companies said in a press release.
DocuSign is "an ideal portfolio company for Second Century Ventures, and we see huge potential for its fast-growing ESIGN services across the residential and commercial Realtor landscape,” Stinton said.
In an interview before the announcement, DocuSign founder Tom Gonser told Inman News that the company is adding more than 1,000 real estate companies a month, thanks largely to word of mouth.
While financial services companies still make up the majority of DocuSign users, the company has reached a "critical mass" with real estate agents.
"It's gone from something that's nice to have to something you have to have," Gonser said.
Since its inception, Second Century has reviewed more than 180 investment opportunities, three of which have been approved by the board to term sheet negotiations.
In addition to DocuSign, one other investment -- in ePropertyData, a Commercial Information Exchange (CIE) technology company -- has been executed. Other companies in Second Century's portfolio include previous investments by NAR in Move Inc., zipLogix and SentriLock.
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Submitted by Richard Fisher - Morro Bay Realty on November 17, 2009 - 9:04pm.
Our Real Estate companies started using DocuSign when it was first introduced by Zipformonline/Winformonline. We have worked to build our streamlined paperless processing of Real Estate Transaction forms around DocuSign. We have built our procedures around Zipformonline/Winformonline to DocuSign for e-signature and processing to TransactionPoint for storage and availabilty 24/7/365/7 to all parties in the Real Estate transaction.
You want to go GREEN, use DocuSign. With our process we have in a few short years reduced our consumption of paper and ink by better than 75% with some overall cost savings. Just the Postage alone is a great saving.
Generally it will not happen overnight as all your agents and employees have to be trained and committed to the process to be able to work with their clients and make the process successful. Advertise the fact you are going GREEN by using the electonic process and many clients will push your employees and agents to come into the 21st century. We work with agents and clients in their late teens to their late eightys and once they have used it they would not go back to the old pen and paper days.
One of the great things about the 3 companies, zipLogix (Zipformonline), DocuSign and TransactionPoint is they are listening to what we say would improve our service to our clients and making those changes happen. These 3 companies are constantly revoving into better companies with better products to meet our and the consumers needs.
Great product and great company.
Submitted by Derec Shuler on November 18, 2009 - 1:04pm.
I've been a Docusign user and advocate for several years now. This tool is a cornerstone in my Green and paperless office initiative and extremely well received by my clients.
With NAR's backing, I'd like to see more pressure and influence placed on lenders and the FHA to recognize and accept the legality of E-SIGN compliant tools like Docusign.
Cheers,
Derec @derecshuler
http://www.MileHighUrbanLiving.com
Submitted by Matt Carter on July 16, 2010 - 12:59pm.
Follow up: It has since been disclosed that Second Century Ventures LLC purchased a 5.43 percent stake in DocuSign for $2 million. NAR acquired 2.26 million shares of stock in the deal, plus options to purchase an additional 1 million shares within the next five years for 88.3 cents per share.