This is the third time that my wife and I have gone through the mountain of paperwork that is buying a house in five years. It never ceases to surprise me the amount of paperwork that is generated, and the inefficiency of the processes.

I moved with my family to Boise back in October of 2007. At the time we still owned our house in Washington, and indeed that was the case until about a month ago. After celebrating the fact that we sold a house in a down market without taking a financial beating, we decided it was time to buy a house here in Boise.

 I talk to lots of folks in the Mortgage Industry, and they all have boxes and boxes of paper stored. They have requirement of up to 7 years, but the surprising thing is that it doesn’t need to be paper.

What we’ve done in many cases is implement a basic EDM system (as in under $5,000 in some cases), and scan closed files instead of moving them to storage. Then the files are burned to CD, and have retrieval clients on the CD as well. If a file ever needs to be retrieved, the file is queried, and it tells you which CD it’s on. It’s a great way to secure your documents, and avoid the expense and inconvenience of offsite storage.

If you are interested in a more robust manner of working with customer files, read the attached case study.