Real estate transcription provides professionals various benefits, from streamlining workflow to enhancing on-site recording and documentation. Those in the real estate industry are now signing up with professional transcription services to take advantage of such benefits—and who can blame them? With the right service provider, transcripts can make deals smoother and make their professional lives easier.
In this article, you’ll learn how:
- Real estate transcription services ensure accurate and efficient documentation of property-related information. These services help organize property listings, contracts, and agreements, making them easily accessible for future reference.
- Real estate transcription can also be useful for legal documents and fundamental in supporting fair housing laws.
- The increased demand for transcription services has led some companies to offer fast but low-quality services. Professionals in the real estate industry need to be more discerning with transcription choices.
What Is Real Estate Transcription?
Some might think transcription is a service limited to legal, medical, and law enforcement industries. However, that outdated concept should have gone the way of the typewriter and pager. In today’s fast-paced, always-connected business environment, something so seemingly simple as writing down dictated words on digital documents can put you miles above your competition.
Real estate transcription services convert audio files from real estate agents, appraisers, and inspectors into written text. These services aid in maintaining compliance with legal requirements and provide a verifiable transcript of important conversations or negotiations related to real estate transactions.
How Can You Get Transcripts?
The transcription process is relatively simple, and it starts with recording anything remotely important and saving it as audio or video files. Whether you use professional recording devices or your handy cellphone is up to you; the important part is the conversations or notes are digitally saved.
Now, this part can get tricky. You see, real estate companies and professionals have several choices in getting transcripts— some of them are distinctly better than others.
Option 1: “It’s easy. I’ll do it myself.”
The first option—and this is what everybody considers first—is transcribing the audio files yourself.
“Why not?” you might think. It’s just listening and typing rolled into one.
Well, there are a couple of things that need to be fixed with this line of thinking. First, transcribing might sound easy—and Ditto Transcripts certainly makes it look easy. However, it’s really anything but easy. Listening skills balanced with fast typing take years to perfect. Clients often send us half-finished transcripts and audio files because they gave up halfway through their own transcription.
If that’s not enough, consider this: it takes a professional transcriber three to four hours to complete a job – for every hour of audio – and that’s for easy audio files. By easy, I mean recordings with crystal-clear quality, no background noise, and one or two speakers. Then, proofreading, editing, and quality assurance checks are a breeze.
Who has time for that? (Well, we do, but that’s the whole point of our business. You should focus on yours.)
You might think that hiring someone for the job is better. However, consider the expenses of hiring, training, and keeping transcriptionists on payroll. Any business transcription requires skill and expertise; those don’t come cheap in today’s workplace economy. Transcribers earn over $60,000 annually, excluding training, equipment, and benefits costs.
Option 2: Let The Robots Do It
AI models are everywhere, and businesses use them for all types of things. But they aren’t perfect. Imagine you came across a listing that said the home was 1500 sq feet when it was only 1290. That’s a big difference right?
Yes, AI can help real estate agents with some aspects of their work, like lead generation, improving marketing strategies, predictive analysis, and evaluating the market value of a property. And, you’ll notice we didn’t include “transcription” there. That’s because, for all its uses, AI, speech-to-text, and other automated tools are not the best choices for your transcription needs. They are, unfortunately, not accurate, with the very best of them only able to reach 86% accuracy: Like 1500sq listing that’s really only 1290.
Accurate transcription services like those provided by Ditto can help real estate companies save time. Having inaccurate transcripts effectively negates that benefit, as people will then have to sit down and proofread transcripts before they can be archived or used. That’s not the best use of anyone’s time and resources.
Option 3: Outsource To (Human) Professionals
And so we’ve saved the best for last: use human transcription providers to get the entire benefit from real estate transcription. With Ditto, you’ll get all the advantages and none of the drawbacks. You’ll save time and money, get expert services, and have your transcripts checked and proofread according to the highest possible industry quality.
Human transcription services like Ditto guarantee businesses interested in real estate transcription more than 99% accuracy. You get professionals working on your files, flexible features, and one of the industry’s most affordable real estate transcription services. We also don’t limit ourselves to offering real estate transcription. Here are just some of the services we offer:
- Conference calls transcription
- Client meeting transcription
- Insurance transcription
- Legal transcription
- Podcasts or video transcription
- Online and paper reports transcription
- Document-to-document conversion
7 Benefits Of Real Estate Transcription Services
As mentioned earlier, real estate transcription (the human ones, anyway) offers many benefits. Let’s start with the most important:
Accurate Recording
I’m not knocking on real estate recordings, however, we’re only human and make mistakes. We’ve had experiences where there was a third bedroom in a two-bedroom house. Transcription, believe it or not, can help avoid those.
Transcripts provide the full picture of inspections, negotiations, property descriptions, fair market value appraisals, or anything connected with buying or selling a home. Remember, real estate meetings can involve a lot of numbers, descriptions, conditions of the property, price negotiations or valuations, terms and conditions, and client preferences. It can also help with construction or land-related files.
Real estate brokerages and individual professionals might be able to remember most of these, or they can take note of them. Still, accurate transcription gives you the best recordings of all discussions, ensuring everything is fair, accurate, and above board.
Enhanced Documentation
Real estate deals involve a lot of paperwork and legal documentation. Converting audio or video recordings into transcripts can help create crystal-clear property reports, home inspection details, lease agreements, and transaction summaries. This, in turn, helps inspectors and real estate professionals save or archive all relevant paperwork.
Real estate attorneys can also greatly benefit from this, as everything can be properly recorded and documented. That removes any potential ambiguity and adds clarity and precision to every case. It also helps keep everyone on the same page.
Saves Time And Money
Real estate professionals are busy running their businesses, and anybody running businesses these days has no time to sit down and convert audio to text. Remember, it takes a long time to do those transcription projects yourself.
Outsourcing transcription requirements gives you the time to focus on core business activities like making cold calls, door knocking, talking to clients, conducting open houses and property tours, and most importantly, closing deals.
Ditto Transcripts offers standard pricing at $1.75 per audio minute for a turnaround time of three to five days. We also offer more economical or faster turnaround times for real estate firms looking for more flexible pricing options. Contact us for a free quote, or speak to our management team to determine the best option.
Improved Client Services
Accurate documentation of every step of the real estate process can be a godsend for brokers and clients. Transcripts can provide clients with accurate and accessible information about properties, agreements, meetings, and anything else to help their decision-making. This helps keep the whole deal’s integrity, improves communications, and leads to happier clients. And we all know that satisfied clients are more likely to refer others.
Legal Protection
Real estate contracts should ideally be black and white. However, there are times when verbal agreements are unavoidable, which can make things more complicated. Verbal contracts, disclosures, and negotiated deals are difficult to pinpoint and enforce.
Transcripts can address that issue by creating accurate, word-for-word, recordings of every meeting involved in the deal. This gives real estate professionals and clients legal protection and a valid avenue for settling disputes.
Accessibility And Regulatory Compliance
One of the best benefits of transcription is allowing everyone in your organization access to the same information, regardless of status or disability. Transcripts can be provided in document or pdf form while video recordings can be captioned or subtitled for easier access for people who need or prefer reading to listening.
Furthermore, certain laws like the ADA (Americans With Disabilities Act) work to level the real estate playing field for everyone, and providing transcripts of deals can cover a part of its requirements.
Marketing And Presentations
Real-time meetings are essential to real estate deals, but video presentations can provide real estate professionals with a more expanded network. Additionally, presentations and marketing materials can be uploaded to social media, giving your business more exposure.
Transcripts can make your videos more visible with search engine optimization. Search engines can crawl through the entire content, not just your title and metadata, giving it more chances of getting ranked on search pages.
Looking For Professional Transcription? Ditto Has Got You Covered
Don’t break the bank with hiring in-house, and don’t settle for shoddy, inaccurate transcripts from AI tools. Get the best of everything with Ditto Transcripts. We offer 100% U.S.-based human services, 99% accuracy guarantees, fast turnaround times, affordable pricing structures, quality customer service, stringent security, and access to the industry’s best and most experienced transcriptionists.
Ditto Transcripts is a HIPAA-compliant and CJIS-compliant Denver, Colorado-based academic transcription services company that provides fast, accurate, and affordable transcripts for individuals and companies of all sizes. Call (720) 287-3710 today for a free quote, and ask about our free five-day trial.
