The Blog

Many home buyers and home sellers these days are very tech-savvy. And, more and more, agents are communicating with home buyers and home sellers via text message. So, given the fact that real estate professionals are required to keep a file of all of their communication, it stands to reason that the text messages should be included—or shouldn’t they?

Good news for California Realtors® came in the form of Realtor-backed legislation which was recently signed into law with respect to record retention.

Brokers do not have to retain texts, instant messages or other electronic messages “of an ephemeral nature” connected with a transaction, according Assembly Bill 2136.

But, what about email messages? The California Association of Realtors® advises agents to create a good storage system for their emails that provide information material to the transaction and licensed activity. One way to do that would be to place all of your emails from a transaction in a file folder within your email system. These transaction coordinators at Transaction 911 recommend naming that folder with the property address. Then, at the end of the transaction, you can save all of those emails into a single pdf (or print them) and then put them into your online or paper file. Look at products such as Zapier or IFTTT, which (when set up correctly) will automatically download certain emails into folders and save them as pdfs for you—without you doing a single thing!

But, what about tweets? The good news is that those also appear to fall into the “ephemeral nature” category. And, unless they are meaty, it is fairly likely that you do not need to retain them.

If you or anyone you know is looking for information on how to retain document files or if you are looking for a transaction coordinator, please do not hesitate to contact the team at Transaction 911.