How to set up an online lease signing process

Most guides about signing a lease online are written for the tenant — someone who got a PDF and needs to send it back. This one is for the other side of the email: you own the unit, you’re sending the lease out, and you want a process you can repeat every time a tenant moves in rather than improvising it at 10pm.

There are two honest answers here, and which one you need comes down to a single question: do you need the document routed between people, or do you just need two signatures on a file?

First, decide: routing or round-trip?

You need a routing service if you’re regularly sending leases to people who aren’t in front of you, you want the tenant to be walked through required fields so they can’t miss a page, you want automatic reminders when they don’t sign, and — the real reason — you want an audit trail: a timestamped record of who opened it, from what IP, and when they signed. DocuSign, Dropbox Sign, SignWell and the property-specific tools (Avail, TenantCloud) all do this. If you manage several units, that record is worth the subscription, and nothing on this page replaces it.

A plain email round-trip is enough if you’re a one- or two-unit landlord, you know your tenant, and the lease is a normal residential agreement. Then the “process” is just: send the PDF, they sign it on their phone, they email it back, you countersign, you send the fully-executed copy to everyone. No per-seat subscription, no account for your tenant to create.

Being blunt about it: Signed does not route documents between signers. It’s an app for signing a PDF that’s on your phone — no sending, no tracking, no reminders, no signer fields. If the paragraph above about audit trails describes your situation, use a routing service. Signed’s place in this page is the countersigning step, and we’d rather tell you that up front than sell you the wrong shape of tool.

The email round-trip process, start to finish

Here’s the version worth writing down so every tenant gets the same treatment.

1. Get the lease into a final PDF before anyone signs

Fill in every variable — names, unit address, rent, deposit amount, start and end dates, pet and utility terms — before it leaves your outbox. A lease that arrives with blanks invites the tenant to fill them in themselves, and a lease that gets edited after a signature is on it is a mess you’ll be untangling later. Export to PDF; don’t send an editable Word file.

2. Send it with instructions, not just an attachment

One short email does most of the work:

Attached is the lease for [address], starting [date]. Please read it in full, sign and date on page [X], initial the bottom of each page, and reply to this email with the signed PDF. Once I have it I’ll countersign and send you the fully-executed copy for your records. Let me know if anything doesn’t match what we discussed.

That paragraph prevents nearly every round of back-and-forth: it tells them what to sign, where, how to return it, and that a countersigned copy is coming.

3. Make it easy for them to sign on a phone

Most tenants will do this on the phone in their hand, and they don’t need to buy anything. It’s worth knowing what they’ll actually do, so you can answer when they ask:

iPhone / iPad, free and built in: open the PDF → tap the Markup (pen) icon → + → Signature → draw with a finger → place and resize. Fine for a signature and a date.
Mac: open in Preview → Markup toolbar → Signature.
Windows: Adobe Acrobat Reader (free) → Fill & Sign.
An app, if their lease is the multi-page kind that wants initials on every page — that’s the part Markup makes tedious.

If a tenant asks how, the tenant-side walkthrough lives at how to sign a lease online, and the reply-with-the-signed-copy mechanics are at how to sign and return a lease by email. Sending them a link is faster than explaining it.

4. Check what comes back before you countersign

Open the returned PDF and confirm three things: the signature and date are actually on the page (not an empty form), every page they were asked to initial is initialled, and no numbers changed. It takes thirty seconds and it’s the only real quality gate in the whole process.

5. Countersign and send the executed copy

This is your half, and it’s the part you’ll do on your phone in a car park more often than at a desk. Open the tenant’s returned PDF in Signed, drop your saved signature and today’s auto-filled date on the landlord line, add initials on each page if the lease asks for them, and export. Signed exports a flattened PDF — the signature is merged into the page rather than left as a floating annotation someone could drag off or delete later, which matters more on the final executed copy than on anything else in this process.

Then email that file to the tenant and keep it yourself. A lease isn’t done when the tenant signs; it’s done when both parties hold the same fully-executed copy.

6. File it somewhere you’ll find it in eleven months

Name the file so it sorts: 2026-08-15 — 14 Oak St Unit 2 — Lease — EXECUTED.pdf. Keep the original email thread too — the message where you sent it and the reply where they returned it are a plain-English record of when each step happened. It’s not an audit trail, but it’s not nothing.

What this process doesn’t give you

Worth being clear, because the honest limits are exactly where you’d want a different tool:

No verification of who signed. An emailed PDF proves a signature arrived from an email address, not that a specific person made it. Routing services exist largely to close that gap.
No reminders or tracking. If the tenant sits on it for a week, you’ll find out by noticing.
No protection against a document being altered. Flattening the final copy helps, and keeping the email thread helps, but neither is a tamper-evident seal.
No legal opinion. Whether a lease signed this way is enforceable depends on your jurisdiction, the length of the term, and what your local law requires — some places treat long commercial leases differently, and some documents call for a notary or witnesses. This is a signing tool, not legal advice; if the stakes or the term are unusual, ask a local attorney or your area’s landlord-tenant resource. See are electronic signatures accepted? for the honest version of that question.

The short version

For one or two units: send a finished PDF with clear instructions → tenant signs on their phone → they email it back → you check it → countersign in Signed and export flattened → send the executed copy to both sides and file it. For a portfolio, or any time you need proof of who signed and when, pay for a routing service — that record is what you’re actually buying.