Home Purchase Contracts with HelloSign

HelloSign powers Safe Rate's platform so real estate agents, home buyers, home sellers and lenders can create a streamlined e-sign process for purchase contracts, addenda and letters of explanation

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Inspiration

Safe Rate is a recently launched, startup mortgage lender that does not pay for ads. We instead grow by partnering with real estate agents, homebuilders, and employers and creating useful tools and features to help them do more business and offer more benefits. Our unique no-advertising approach empowers us to offer consumers the best deals on their mortgage loans, and to offer our partners useful features that make their lives easier.

Since we are a mortgage lender who works with consumers and real estate agents, we often have a need to update or amend the purchase contract to ensure the loan receives final approval. These requests are typically done over email and given the multiparty nature, can be slow to take place because it's cumbersome to manually update a PDF file and then initiate the e-sign requests. Plus, parties often struggle to easily access the most recent version purchase contract as it requires them to revisit long email threads that contain multiple versions. There's also a lot of important data that's buried in the contract, that, if pulled into a database, can help prevent issues like missing a mortgage contingency date that may derail the entire transaction.

One additional item for this hackathon is that when we are originating mortgage loans with our customers, we often have to ask our customers to provide letters of explanation for items like recent credit report inquiries or sources of down-payment. We typically create a template as a document, email it to the client, have them fill it out, send it back to us, and then we make an e-sign request to the client's preferred email by manually uploading it for e-signing.

What it does

Our integration with HelloSign has enabled us to create a brand new, Purchase Contract workflow for real estate agents. It empowers real estate agents to create, modify, amend, retrieve, and e-sign purchase contracts with homebuyers and home sellers. All of the administration and information generation takes place on Safe Rate, it then uses HelloSign for the e-signature process. Parties to the transaction automatically have access to the purchase contract as well. As Safe Rate's community grows, we'll be able to help autocomplete much of the information to save additional time in the future.

We have also created a Letter of Explanation tool. Now, any of our borrowers can visit the site and simply put in the explanatory text that's needed and click submit. The letter of explanation automatically gets sent to their email and now we don't have to be involved at all. It's a useful self-service option that saves us time and helps us close loans more quickly.

How we built it

  1. We first created, uploaded and marked up the document templates in HelloSign.
  2. We utilized web-based form libraries and created JSON schemas to collect the more than 200+ fields of information and validate it.
  3. We submitted the data to one of three marked-up templates on Safe Rate's HelloSign account by sending our data to the server and using the npm package.
  4. We tested out the functionality in isolated environments. You can review our source code here: Server-side code and Client-side code
  5. We integrated the functionality into our dev environment. You can see the working demos here: Purchase contract workflow and Letter of Explanation

Challenges we ran into

We experienced some difficulty in getting the HelloSign nodejs package installed via npm both locally and on Serverless cloud. We switched to yarn package manager and that worked best for us going forward.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • We made three dynamic, e-signable forms for our users despite having no prior experience with HelloSign's API
  • The purchase contract in particular consists of 200+ fields, and it fully works and can now actually power real life purchase offers and contracts!
  • These will help us save time and money for real estate agents and clients

What we learned

  • How to markup and dynamically populate HelloSign templates
  • How to interact with HelloSign's API
  • How to use Dropbox Capture
  • We also incorporated a new package (new to us) rjsf form to make inputs and schema checking more explicit and straightforward.

What's next for Home Purchase Contracts with HelloSign

  • Improve form validation and formatting for the inputs.
  • Present it to real estate agents, especially those not already on the platform, to better understand how we can continue to evolve it to meet their needs.
  • Incorporate additional metadata from the multiple listings service (MLS) and and/or groups like Estated to pre-populate some of the purchase contract information and save the real estate agents more time.
  • Linking Safe Rate's entire database to the workflow that we've built today for one individual user, so that we can offer the full functionality sitewide
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