RISMEDIA, October 7, 2009—WAV Group Inc., a leading real estate consulting firm recently released the WAV Group 2009 Transaction Management Adoption Study.
Mike Audet, a founding partner of WAV Group reports that transaction management has come of age. “We are seeing encouraging online transaction management adoption increases throughout the country, in our own research and in numbers we have reviewed from the major transaction management vendors. What we pointed out in our 2005 study appears to have come true. Adoption is taking place in “modules” such as forms, Internet fax and document management first with more advanced modules, such as digital signature, showing more modest gains.”
In the 2005 WAV Group Transaction Management Adoption Study, WAV Group identified a number of factors that were inhibiting adoption of transaction management solutions and recommended steps to improve adoption. The key recommendation was rolling out transaction technology in modules to make adoption easier.
According to the WAV Group, Martin Scrocchi, CEO of Instanet Solutions confirms the module approach is working and also points out the importance of tying this technology directly to MLS systems, “Internet faxing and document management are really taking off, especially in the markets where document management is integrated directly into the MLS system so that the forms can auto-populate and transaction folders can be initiated directly from the listing.“
The WAV Group 2009 Transaction Management Adoption Study surveyed over 1,700 brokers and agents from 22 different MLSs. In addition, WAV Group worked with major Transaction Management vendors to look at their product adoption trends over the last few years.
As the 2009 study reveals, overall interest in transaction management is up since 2005. Walt Clark, senior vice president of Transaction and Document Management Solutions at LPS says their numbers support these findings, reporting they have experienced an average 35% annual increase in the number of transactions entered since 2005. During that same period, they report the number of digitized and stored documents increased significantly as well, averaging over 40% annually. This reflects similar reported increases WAV Group reviewed from several other transaction management vendors, supporting the results obtained in the 2009 survey.
Other key findings in the study include:
-The desire to adopt “Green” business practices is a key driver of paperless online transaction processing today.
-Agents now realize they can save time and money by eliminating the cost of paper, ink, storage costs and even insurance premiums through online transaction processing.
-Respondents said they use online transaction processing because it helps them improve communication with their clients.
-There is growing dissatisfaction with current methods of handling transactions and more interest in adopting transaction management.
-Online transaction processing systems have very favorable user ratings overall but improvements to “usability” is still noted as a key opportunity to encourage continued adoption.
For more information, visit www.wavgroup.com.
