Feedback on possible idea: Secure File Sharing

[tonyla]

Problem:

Emailing documents back and for between real estate purchasers and real estate professionals (realtor, mortgage broker, accountant, bookkeeper) is:

• insecure
• unreliable and error prone
  disorganized and inefficient

Solution:

Purposed built web application that centralizes document sharing offering security, organization, ease of use for both client and professional.



I personally have found this to be a problem/process that could be improved. I have spoken to others and they share a similar experience. I would love to hear from the many realtors/mortgage brokers/investors on this site, what their opinions are.



Is document sharing a pain? If so how much of a pain?

Would you pay for a web application to solve this problem?

 

[MonteDobson]

Although I am not in your line of work, in our business we utilize DropBox (www.dropbox.com) for file sharing amongst employees and clients. Works great!



Best part is it's free (up to a certain amount of storage) with upgrades available.

 

[tonyla]

Dropbox is a great tool and I use it also.



One of it's largest short comings is sharing files with other users. It requires them to have a dropbox account and then sharing the folder reduces the storage quota for both users.

 

[Thomas Beyer]

[quote user=tonyla]Would you pay for a web application to solve this problem?
no .. as free solutions such as GoogleDocs are available !

 

[kfort]

I think Thomas nailed it... it is very tough to compete with free in any business.

 

[JimWhitelaw]

[quote user=tonyla]Would you pay for a web application to solve this problem?Clearly a lot of people would, as there are dozens of services that do this already.



http://www.google.ca/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=secure+document+transfer

 

[tonyla]

Thanks for all the feedback so far.



I just want to clarify that GoogleDocs satisfies a very different purpose. GoogleDocs is used for document collaboration and editing.



For example GoogleDocs would not be very useful to a realtor that needs receive multiple documents from a buyer for an offer. (Working with a realtor, offer, schedules A/B/C, etc) In theory you could use GoogleDocs to share the documents between buyer and realtor but in reality this is very clumsy, error prone and disorganized.



As far as I can tell by and large digital documents for mortgage applications/offers to purchase are handled through email right now. I find this digital paper pushing is a process that could be vastly improved with some technology.



Is everyone content with emailing around documents? If so, that is fair enough and that's what I want to find out

 

[JimWhitelaw]

For documents with sensitive information, I've used e-courier.ca and yousendit.com.



I also use jungledisk.com extensively for secure document backups and sharing/sync on multiple computers.

 

[RobMacdonald]

I've had some experience with ecourier.com. Once set up, it is quite efficient and customers see to appreciate the extra step towards security.



I keep coming across dropbox, but have never looked into it. I think I'm going to check that out and see how it would work for my clients.

 

[ColdFire]

I agree with Thomas... DropBox is great. It's very easy to use because it creates a file folder right on your desktop and you can share them over the internet. All files are encrypted in their database for security.