At Inman Connect New York, DocuSign CEO Alan Thygesen said the company’s new software, Transaction Space, can reduce the complexity inherent in transaction processes.
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DocuSign’s goal is to become the system of record for contracts, said CEO Alan Thygesen, who spoke on stage at Inman Connect New York on Wednesday. Helping longtime digital document managers achieve their goals is a product called Transaction Spaces, currently in beta testing.
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Thygesen shared the news with the Inman Connect New York audience during a panel discussion centered on how technology is “reshaping real estate.”
Originally from Denmark and living in California, he gleaned expertise from years as a technology leader in Silicon Valley, a tenure that included running Google’s advertising business, including its real estate sector, for more than a decade. Ta. My experience in technology on the West Coast helped me understand how to layer a company’s problems with software solutions while being careful not to invent new problems along the way.
“The more you try to create a need based on technology, rather than starting from the customer pain points and working backwards, the more problems you run into,” Thygesen says.
The company will expand into new territory in the coming months with its Transaction Space solution, which features end-to-end contract flows.
“Real estate transactions are extremely complex. It’s the most important purchase people will make in their lifetime. There are tons of documents, procedures, and people involved, and there’s a lot of risk, and the pieces are barely held together. In most cases, they are pieced together by real estate agents,” Thygesen said.
There are many opportunities for simplification and ways to remove barriers to the human element at the heart of transactions, he said. Asked for more details by Era Ventures’ Clelia Peters, the CEO detailed how his software can flatten the high volume of contracts that come with a standard real estate transaction.
“The easiest way to think about this is to find a place where all parties working on a real estate transaction come together. Think of it as a microsite that covers every step of the process for all parties,” Thygesen said. he said. “If you are a buyer, you can see what steps in the process are not yet completed. If you are an agent, you can submit the various documents that are required. And if you are a vendor, you can feed them Once that process is complete, that data will be shared with all relevant systems.
Although there are many software solutions available today, not many can “talk” to each other, and transactions remain highly fragmented between different technology components.
“This is one example of how we’ve reimagined our workflow, and another example is our single intelligent repository, where all signed and ongoing contracts are stored.” he said. “This is great for documentation and compliance reasons, but it also gives you a complete view of all the pipeline going on in your brokerage.”
This system can extract data from all these draft contracts and use it to make business decisions, focusing on transaction history and what will happen in the coming months.
“These aren’t futuristic, these are things that are changing or in beta,” Thygesen said.
Docusign’s position in this space gives us a unique perspective from which to envision a new future for the field: ways to make transactions smoother, less fragmented, and easier to learn. According to Thygesen, real estate is fundamentally a contract industry, and he believes that’s where the story of real estate makeover begins.
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