Paper sale contracts to send to the appraiser present a problem for e-mail. It's just too much hassle to manually scan all the pages of a contract into your computer to send it to the appraiser or anyone else. Fortunately, there are two solutions to this problem that can save you money on long distance faxes and wear and tear on your fax machine.

1. Most title companies have the ability to send the lender an e-mailed copy of the contract, which you can forward to the appraiser.

2. If you receive your faxes through a computer instead of a fax machine, you can open a faxed contract document, print it as a PDF (using a program like Adobe Acrobat) and send it to the appraiser as an e-mail attachment.

Receiving Faxes through your Computer

Do you receive tons of paper faxes every week? Are you spending a LOT of money on paper, toner or repairs for your fax machine? Go paperless!

A decent fax program like WinFax can be installed on your computer and set up to automatically receive incoming faxes. You just hook up a connection to your computer to the phone jack for your fax line, set up WinFax to receive automatically, and you're in business. WinFax will receive the faxes and let you know when one has come in. Then you open the program, click on the new fax, and view it.

In the example of a sale contract that has come in as a fax, you can open it, read the information you need, and save it either as a WinFax document or as a PDF to any file you like. If you want to save it as a PDF, just print it as you would any other document but select your PDF printer/driver instead of your actual printing machine. Your PDF software will ask what name you want to give the PDF (such as "Melvin Johnson Contract" and where you want to save the document, such as the Melvin Johnson file on your computer.

You can then send this PDF as an e-mail attachment to anyone you want. Most PDF software allows you to e-mail your document right out of the program itself.

Adobe and other PDF Software

Remember that there is a difference between Adobe Acrobat Reader and Adobe Acrobat. The free Adobe Acrobat Reader that most people already have only lets you view and print PDF documents. The full version of Adobe Acrobat lets you view, create and print PDFs.

We recommend getting the full version of Adobe Acrobat but if you would like to try a free PDF creation program, click here to go to a web site where you can download one.