E-signatures for estate agents: ASTs and property paperwork, signed

Property moves at the speed of the slowest signature. A tenant who has viewed a flat on Saturday wants it confirmed before someone else takes it. A buyer who has had an offer accepted wants the memorandum out that afternoon. And an agent juggling a full pipeline cannot afford to chase wet-ink documents around a chain. The signing step, done badly, is where good deals go cold.

This is a look at the documents estate and letting agents send, the pressure to get them signed quickly on a phone, and why a provable record matters just as much as speed.

The forms that keep a deal moving

A busy agency is sending a predictable stack of documents across sales and lettings:

• Assured shorthold tenancy agreements — the core lettings document, often needed at short notice.
• Sales memoranda — the confirmation of terms that gets solicitors moving.
• Terms of business — for landlords and vendors instructing you.
• Guarantor agreements — where a third party's signature is essential.
• ID and AML-adjacent forms — the compliance paperwork that runs alongside every instruction.

Each one has a signer who is rarely at a desk. Tenants, buyers and guarantors are out in the world, and they expect to deal with you on a phone. The document that can be signed there and then is the document that comes back; the one that requires a printer, a scanner, or a new account tends to sit.

Getting a signature on a phone, in minutes

The single biggest win in property signing is removing the login. A tenant should be able to receive an AST, open it on their phone, read it, and sign in one tap — no account, no password, no app. Anything more than that, and you lose people at exactly the moment they were ready to commit.

The tenant who can sign in the car park signs. The one who has to "do it later on the laptop" is the one you end up chasing.

We cover the wider case for this in how to send a contract for signature without a login. For an agent, the benefit is immediate: tenancies confirmed faster, memoranda out the same day, and far less time spent nudging people to finish something they started.

Why a provable record matters in property

Speed alone is not enough. Property paperwork gets scrutinised — by landlords, by solicitors, by deposit schemes, and occasionally in a dispute — and "we're sure they signed it" does not hold up. You want to prove exactly which version of the tenancy was signed, by whom, and when.

A tamper-evident audit trail does that. Every signing event captures timestamps, the email the document went to, and a fingerprint of the file itself, so any later edit is detectable. Our guide to what a tamper-evident audit trail is explains the mechanics. In practice it means that if a tenant later disputes a clause, or a landlord questions what was agreed, you can produce the signed document and prove it has not been altered. On the legal footing of e-signatures generally, are electronic signatures legally binding is a good primer. This is general information, not legal advice.

Signing sits alongside compliance, not instead of it

It is worth being clear about scope. E-signing gets your ASTs and memoranda signed cleanly and provably — it does not carry out your identity checks or your anti-money-laundering obligations for you. Those run in parallel. What good signing adds is a strong, verifiable record around the documents themselves: proof that a named person signed a specific version, captured in a way you can hand to a landlord, a solicitor or a deposit scheme without hesitation.

Where Signet fits

Signet is built for the pace of property. ASTs, memoranda and terms of business are signed in one tap with no account for the tenant or buyer, so a document can go from sent to signed while someone is still standing on the pavement. Every completed agreement carries a tamper-evident audit trail, a certificate of completion, and a publicly verifiable seal that a landlord or solicitor can check for themselves. It is aligned with eIDAS, ESIGN and UETA, with UK and EU data residency, and your documents are never used to train AI.

For a fuller view of how signing fits across sales and lettings, see our solutions overview. Get the signature while the interest is hot — and keep a record you can stand behind long after the keys change hands.

Signet is in private beta, request early access and send your first sealed agreement free.