Selling a House from Kyoto via the Web

It sounds like a bad joke. I was in Kyoto, the sellers were in San Juan Capistrano, the buyers' agent was in Mission Viejo, the buyers were in Moreno Valley, and the house was in Riverside. So how did we do it? The Web, of course! The buyers' agent first faxed the offer to my office where another agent helped me out by scanning and emailing it to me. I also emailed back and forth with the buyers' agent to find out more about their situation and discuss the condition of the house. From there, my sellers and I went over the offer via email while my buddy at the office talked to the buyers' lender to go over how they were structuring the loan. I wrote the counter using Winforms on line, emailed it to my sellers, who then faxed it to my friend. He scanned and emailed contracts, and we were able to open escrow within 48 hours.

The only real difficulties in all of this was that none of the clients had a scanner, and my husband's laptop isn't a tablet. As I said, we got around the first problem by having an agent at my office act as middleman for the documents. And luckily, a colleague of my husband's at the university in Kyoto was able to scan the 2 pages that needed my signature.

I wouldn't want to work this way all the time, and I strongly recommend that clients go with an agent who is in the area. But it's nice to be able to stay on top of things and get some time with my family!