In regard to real estate transactions, Spokane County is on the paperless trail.

The county auditor’s office is testing a system that will allow it to accept documents electronically. When fully integrated, County Auditor Vicki Dalton said the system will speed up the real estate closing process by a day or two.

County records manager Melanie Muzatko said that if a filing is rejected for one reason or another, the system will kick it back within minutes. As it stands, rejection of a file can add a day or two to the process.

For the county – and ultimately for real estate closing offices – these improvements will save money and a considerable amount of time.

The auditor’s office will go live with its system within weeks. Early last week, Stewart Title Co., of Spokane County submitted the first closing document to the county using the new system, called Simplifile.

Stewart Title President Anthony Carollo said the system will lower costs in regards to cashiering, indexing, return mailing and personnel. The company operates a proprietary paperless system in its offices, called StewartOnline, so it will be able to handle transactions largely paperlessly once the county system is fully functional.

“We are excited about helping Spokane County streamline its processes and to make their offices more efficient,” Carollo said.

In addition to the system the auditor’s office is installing, the Spokane County Treasurer’s Office has a system in the works that will accept real estate excise tax electronically. Once that is in place, an entire real estate transaction in the county could be processed paperlessly.

With the county auditor’s office program, the documents go to a third party, and the company that sends the documents to the county will charge the sender $4 for each multipage document. While this will be a new cost for the title companies and other real estate closing offices, the expense should be offset by the fact that those companies won’t be paying employees to print the documents, drive them to the Auditor’s office, and deliver them.

For the county, the savings will come in the form of fewer employee hours spent scanning documents and in dramatically lower postage costs, because they won’t be mailing the original documents back to the closing offices that generated them.

The county received and scanned 500,007 pages last year, which is roughly 2,000 pages per work day.

“Some days are less, and some days are a heck of a lot more,” Dalton said.

Large loan-servicing companies send documents to the county in big, inches-thick batches. Those documents typically are what are referred to as reconveyances, which are documents that indicate a home loan has been paid off, either through a property sale, a refinance or the end of a loan term. The time savings will be especially noticeable when those companies send documents to the county, Dalton said.

The county doesn’t have a set timeline for getting the system fully functional, and it should be sometime in September. Dalton said she doesn’t want to push it.

“This is how real estate transactions are recorded,” she said. “Without this, there is no property sale or home sale. We want to make it as smooth and as fast and as accurate as we possibly can.”