E-signatures for letting and estate agents

The move-in date does not move. The tenant is between two addresses, the guarantor is a parent two hundred miles away, and the landlord is somewhere with a four-hour time difference. All of them have to sign the same agreement before Friday.

Pixacomms Ltd, Cardiff · Updated September 2026

Lettings is not a signing problem in the ordinary sense. One let can involve four or five people who have never been in the same room, a stack of documents that has to go out in roughly the right order, and a set of deadlines that other people set for you. Nothing about it is hard on its own. All of it is hard at once, on a Thursday, when a negotiator is also doing three viewings.

The failure is almost never that a document did not get signed. It is that it got signed late, or by the wrong person, or that six months later nobody can show when it went out and when it came back.

One let, five documents, four people

Look at what a single tenancy actually generates. The agreement itself. Right-to-rent checks and the referencing pack. The prescribed information that goes with the deposit. A guarantor form, if there is a guarantor. The inventory and schedule of condition at check-in. Then twelve months later a renewal, which is the same dance again with less urgency and the same chance of drifting.

Most agencies run this on a mix of email attachments, a portal the tenant will not log into, and a printer in the branch. The result is a folder full of documents whose provenance is a series of email threads. It works right up until a deposit is disputed, a landlord changes agent, or somebody asks a precise question about dates.

• Nobody is at a desk. The tenant is moving. The guarantor is at work. The landlord is abroad. A document that assumes a laptop and a printer will sit unsigned for four days.
• Joint tenants stall each other. Three sharers on one agreement, and the one who is hardest to reach sets the pace for everyone.
• Version confusion. The agreement was amended after a negotiation about the pets clause. Two of the four signed the earlier PDF.
• No independent record of timing. The sent folder shows when you sent it. Nothing in the file proves when they signed it, except their word and yours.

The multi-signer shape, handled properly

This is where a generic signing tool usually falls over. Pixasign puts multiple signers on one document, each with their own fields and their own private link. Tenant one signs their block, tenant two signs theirs, the guarantor signs the guarantee section, and the landlord countersigns. Nobody sees anybody else’s link, and nobody can sign in the wrong place because the fields are assigned before it goes out.

You can also set a signing order, so the document moves through the people in the sequence your process needs rather than all at once. If the landlord should only countersign once every tenant is on it, the landlord does not get their link until that has happened. And if the order does not matter, turn it off and send to everyone together, which is usually the faster choice when a move-in date is close.

Each signer is recorded separately in the audit trail: when their link was opened, when they signed, from what IP and approximate location, and on what device. If one of the four sharers later says they never saw the agreement, that is answerable with a record rather than with a recollection.

Deadlines you do not control but must evidence

Deposit paperwork, renewal notices and referencing all carry timing expectations, and some of them are set by legislation rather than by you. We are not going to tell you what those requirements are — that is a matter for your own compliance advice, your scheme, or your solicitor, and a software supplier is the wrong source for it.

What we can tell you is what evidence you end up with. Every signature carries an RFC 3161 timestamp issued by DigiCert, an independent and publicly trusted timestamping authority. That matters because a date you assert about your own document is worth very little in a dispute. A timestamp from an outside authority is a different thing: it is an attestation, by someone with no interest in the outcome, that the signature existed at that moment. Anyone can check it, including a deposit scheme adjudicator, a landlord’s solicitor, or the agent who takes the portfolio over from you.

Signing from a phone, mid-move

Tenants sign on the device they actually have. There is no app, no account and no password — they get an email, tap the link, read the agreement, sign, and they are done. A guarantor who has never heard of you can do the same without creating anything. Links stay live for fourteen days, which covers the gap between offer and move-in for almost every let.

That matters more for lettings than for most trades, because the people you need are specifically the people whose lives are disrupted that week. A process that assumes a printer is a process that assumes the tenant is settled, and the whole point is that they are not.

What you are left holding afterwards

Every completed document is sealed with a PAdES B-T signature — the standard set out in ETSI EN 319 142 — using RSA-3072 with SHA-256, plus the DigiCert timestamp. Change one character of the agreement after signing and the seal breaks; ordinary PDF software will say so.

Alongside it comes an evidence certificate: every signer, the address each link went to, IP and approximate location, device, and the whole timeline to the second, with SHA-256 fingerprints of the file before and after sealing. The events are hash-chained, so each one locks in the one before it, and altering the history breaks every seal after the alteration.

All of it is checkable without us. A sealed PDF is an ordinary signed PDF and opens in normal PDF software, and we run a free public checker where anybody can drop a file in and be told whether it has changed since sealing. No account, no login. Download your signed tenancies whenever you like; they stand up on their own, which is the difference between owning your records and renting them.

Where an electronic signature is not the whole answer

Electronic signatures are valid and enforceable for the vast majority of UK business documents. There are categories that carry extra formality requirements — deeds and certain land and property matters among them, where witnessing and other conditions come into play. Some documents in an agency’s stack may fall into those categories depending on how they are drafted.

We are not in a position to tell you which of your templates those are, and any supplier who does tell you should worry you. Take the list to whoever drafts your agreements or advises you on compliance, get a straight answer about which documents can be signed electronically in your process, and then use this for those. That is a smaller claim than the one our competitors make, and it is the honest one.

Pricing, for a branch where everybody sends paperwork

Per-user pricing is the wrong shape for an agency. The lettings negotiator sends the tenancy, the property manager sends the renewal, the branch manager sends the landlord terms of business, and whoever is covering on Saturday sends whatever is urgent. Per-seat pricing means either paying for all of them or sharing one login — and sharing a login wrecks the audit trail you bought the thing for.

Pixasign is flat with unlimited users: £29 a month for 50 documents, £59 for 200, £99 for 500. VAT is included, so the number you see is the number you pay. Put the whole branch on it. Tenants, guarantors and landlords never pay anything and never need an account.

Everything is hosted in Nuremberg with backups in Reykjavík. Nothing is in the United States, which is a question that comes up more often now when a landlord or a corporate client reads your data-protection paperwork.

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