E-signature for a lease agreement

The lease is the document where a signing process either works or quietly falls apart. Not because the law is harder, but because there are four people, nine pages, initials on all of them, a condition report that arrived as a separate file, and one tenant who only ever opens email on a phone.

Everything below is general information, not legal advice. Residential tenancy law is set state by state in Australia and state by state in the United States, and the rules differ, so check the tenancy authority where the property is before you change how you sign.

Can a lease be signed online

There are two separate questions hiding in that one, and conflating them is the usual mistake.

The first is whether an electronic signature can satisfy a signature requirement at all. The Commonwealth Electronic Transactions Act 1999 answers that for Commonwealth laws: a signature requirement is met if a method identified the person and indicated their intention, the method was as reliable as appropriate for the purpose in light of all the circumstances, and the person the signature is given to consents to that method. Note the heading it sits under, “Requirements under laws of the Commonwealth”. Residential tenancy is not Commonwealth law. Each state and territory has its own electronic transactions Act for its own laws, and that is the one that reaches a lease.

The second question is whether this document has its own form requirements: prescribed wording, a witness, registration, a copy given within a set number of days. Nothing in electronic transactions law touches those. The eIDAS Regulation says so in as many words at article 2(3), which provides that the Regulation does not affect the law on the conclusion and validity of contracts or other obligations relating to form. A lease can be perfectly signable electronically and still be defective because a prescribed term is missing.

One more distinction worth carrying, because it gets misquoted constantly. The US ESIGN Act’s exclusions at section 103 do not exclude leases. What they exclude is notices: section 103(b)(2)(B) takes out any notice of default, acceleration, repossession, foreclosure or eviction under a credit agreement secured by, or a rental agreement for, a primary residence. The tenancy agreement is not on that list; the eviction notice is. Anyone who tells you American law bans e-signed leases has read the wrong line.

For the actual rules where you are, start at the tenancy authority: in New South Wales, for instance, Fair Trading publishes what a residential tenancy agreement has to contain and what has to be given to the tenant.

The signers and the order

A lease request has three or four recipients and no reason to make them queue. Leave sign in order off, everyone is invited at once, and each signature is stamped into the working copy as it arrives.

The exception is where the agent’s signature is meant to be an acceptance of the tenants’ offer rather than a party signing alongside them. Then order does mean something, and you should switch it on deliberately. Watch out for one quirk while you do: a newly created request has order enforcement set to true in the database while the prepare screen renders the switch off, so the two disagree until you touch the switch. Set it explicitly either way.

Field counts for a realistic four-recipient lease are in the table below.

Initials on every page: how and why

Initials on a lease do a specific job: they make it harder for anyone to claim later that a page was substituted. That is why the convention exists, and it comes from paper.

On a certified PDF, tamper evidence is already handled by the certification, which invalidates the signature on any later change. So initials are doing something narrower now: they record that each page was in front of the signer. That is still worth having on a lease, where the rent, the term and the bond all sit on different pages.

The practical cost is lower than it sounds. Placing them is the work, since you need one initials field per page per tenant, but signing them is not: one drawn or typed mark fills every signature and initials position for that signer in a single action. The default initials box is 80 by 50 points, which is comfortably clear of body text in a margin. If you are weighing initials against a full signature on each page, initials versus signature is the shorter answer.

Identity: the access code the agent shares

Three checks exist: the emailed link alone, an access code, or a six digit code emailed at the moment of signing. For a lease the access code earns its place.

An access code is at least four characters, it is stored as a salted hash, and the API never returns it, so the only way a tenant gets it is if you tell them: on the phone when you confirm the application, or in person at the property. That out-of-band step is the whole point, because it means the person signing had to have something other than access to an inbox. Five wrong attempts locks that recipient out for fifteen minutes.

The trade-off is support calls. Choose deliberately rather than by habit, and see how to verify a signer’s identity for what each check actually proves, or access code versus one-time code for the shorter comparison.

What the tenants see

Before verifying, a tenant sees the request title, your message, their own name and role, and which check is required. Nothing of the document itself is returned until the check passes, which is worth knowing if you are about to put a street address in the title.

After that, the lease opens with only their own fields highlighted. On a phone the layout changes: the document goes read-only, typed fields move to a panel above it, and a counter walks them from one signature spot to the next. Consent is a hard gate at the bottom of the screen and is refused again by the server if it is missing.

Two upload rules will catch you out before any of that if the lease came from a scanner. A PDF with a page rotation set is rejected at upload, naming the page, and a password-protected PDF is rejected too. Fix both in the source file. The condition report has to be merged into the same PDF as well, since one request carries exactly one document, and merging PDFs is a browser job.

After signing: certificate, copies, thirty days

When the last tenant signs, the stamped file is certified and everyone gets an email with the certified PDF attached, sender included. The certificate of completion is written as its own separate PDF and lists, per signer, which identity check they passed, when they signed, the IP address recorded, and the consent version they accepted.

The request expires thirty days after it was created. That is not adjustable in the application, so a lease sitting with a tenant who is still deciding will expire on its own. Resending rotates the link and kills the old one, which is also how you clear a lockout.

The example

Picture a nine page agreement for a fictional agency, Kestrel Property, with two tenants and no guarantor. Three recipients, sign in order off, thirty four fields: five for the agent, twelve each for the tenants, of which nine are the page initials. The condition report was merged into the lease PDF before upload, so the whole tenancy travels as one file with one certificate behind it. That is the shape to copy, and it takes about ten minutes to lay out the first time and about two thereafter.