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Docusign’s goal is to become the system of record for agreements, according to CEO Allan Thygesen, who spoke onstage at Inman Connect New York Wednesday. Helping the longstanding digital document manager get there will be a product now in beta testing called Transaction Spaces.
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Thygesen shared the news with the audience at Inman Connect New York in a panel that centered on how technology is “remaking real estate.”
The Denmark native and California resident collected technology leadership expertise from years in Silicon Valley, a tenure that included more than a decade running Google’s ad business, which included the real estate sector. That time in the West Coast tech sector helped him understand how to overlap a company’s pain points with a software solution, being careful not to invent new ones along the way.
“The more you try to invent needs based on technology as opposed to starting from the customer pain point and going back, the more you run into trouble,” Thygesen said.
The company is pushing into new territory in the coming months with its Transaction Spaces solution, featuring end-to-end agreement flows.
“The real estate transaction is very complex. It’s the most important purchase people make in their lifetimes; it has a tremendous amount of documents and steps and parties involved, a lot of risk, and those pieces are barely stitched together. Mostly they’re stitched together by Realtors,” Thygesen said.
There are a lot of opportunities for simplification and ways to remove the barriers that block the central human component to a deal, he said. Pressed for specifics by Era Ventures’ Clelia Peters, the CEO detailed how his software can flatten the stack of agreements that accompany the standard real estate deal.
“The simplest way to think about it is finding a place for all the parties working on a real estate transaction to meet; think of it as a micro-site that has every step in the process for every party,” Thygesen said. “If you’re the buyer you can go see what steps you have yet to complete in the process, if you’re the agent you can post the various documents needed and if you’re a vendor, you can feed into that and, as that process completes, that data is shared with all the relevant systems.”
Even with the multitude of software solutions available today, there aren’t many that “talk” to one another, and transactions remain largely fragmented among various technological components.
“That’s one example of us reimagining the workflow, and another example is our single intelligent repository, a place where all agreements go when signed as well those agreements in process,” he said. “For documentation and compliance reasons that’s nice, but it also allows you to give a a full pipeline view of everything that’s happening in the brokerage.”
That system can extract the data from all those draft agreements and use it to drive business decisions, giving a lens into transaction history and also what’s likely to happen in the next few months.
“These aren’t futuristic things, these are things that are shifting or in beta,” Thygesen said.
Docusign’s standing in the space gives it a unique perspective from which to envision a new future for the space, a way to make deals smoother, less fragmented and easier to learn from. Real estate, according to Thygesen, is fundamentally an industry of agreements, and that’s where he believes the story of its remake begins.