Title companies are pulling out all the stops to get deals closed during the COVID-19 pandemic. But they say the best way to close -- not just during the outbreak, but moving forward -- is electronically.

Specifically, title firms are backing what they call remote online notarization -- RON, for short.

Typically, closing documents are papers that must be signed in front of a notary public. Notaries ensure the signatures on documents are authentic, and that the signer knows what he or she is signing and does so voluntarily -- thus helping prevent fraud and forgeries.

Around the turn of the century, federal and state laws began authorizing the use of electronic signatures. But the states were slow to implement and approve the technology. It wasn’t until 2011 that Virginia became the first state to OK remote electronic notarization.

Two years ago, the National Association of Secretaries of State, a group of officials from all 50 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories, gave the movement a needed push by adopting nationwide standards for online notarization.

Meanwhile, at the federal level, a bipartisan federal bill to enact a consistent RON standard has been introduced, but has yet to gain any traction, according to Kobie Pruitt of the Mortgage Bankers Association. And that has implications of its own.

“The absence of a single federal law, along with state efforts to create emergency orders to permit loan closings, has created a mismatch of rules across the country for the use of remote online notarization,” says the MBA’s Rick Hill. This leaves befuddled investors like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to figure out what’s permissible on their own.

To date, according to NASS, 38 states have authorized some form of e-notarization, which they call REN, or remote e-notarization. But only 23 promote the practice, and perhaps half of those are still writing their rules and regulations.

Because of the coronavirus, though, several states have issued emergency orders temporarily permitting remote notarization. But until other states move forward, some title companies are doing all they can to make the closing as safe and easy as possible during the pandemic.

And make no mistake, title companies are busy -- though mostly with refinancings. “Business has been off the charts,” says Patrick Stone of WFG National Title. In the last 30 days, though, settlements with homebuyers have “dropped off significantly,” Stone says.

When there is an in-person closing, Stone says that WFG title agents are “making every effort to minimize personal contact.” Others are doing the same.

Those efforts include cleaning and sanitizing closing rooms, wearing gloves and masks, providing hand sanitizer, using only brand-new pens at each closing, and even putting up Plexiglas walls with holes at the bottom so papers can be pushed back and forth. They are also pursuing what Stone calls AVON, or audio-visual online notarization. But Stone would prefer to go full-bore with RON.

So would Allan Pollack of OpenClose, a loan-origination software company. “RON was never more important than today,” he says. “The old way of doing business has changed.”

Fidelity National Financial, the country’s largest title insurance company, is launching what it calls a “comprehensive digital closing experience” with a platform that brings buyers and sellers into the process prior to the actual closing. It uses digital signature technology that allows for certain documents to be signed in advance, in areas where RON is permitted.

Some closing outfits have become even more creative. Some are going to people’s residences to get the job done; others are performing curbside closings similar to the curbside pickups being offered by restaurants.

Cook & James is doing both. Prior to the crisis, the Georgia law firm was doing “at home” closings. “It doesn’t matter if it is at home, at your office or even at your favorite happy hour spot,” reads the firm’s website. “As long as we have access to a power outlet and a cell signal, we’re good to go.”

Now, it’s doing curbside settlements. Drive up to one of the firm’s two Atlanta-area offices and a masked and gloved attorney will bring the documents and a fresh pen to your car window. Clients wait in their cars while the masked agent goes back and forth from office to vehicle.

Another Georgia company uses two traffic lanes: one for buyers, the other for sellers. Others are closing deals while keeping a safe distance from clients on porches, patios and driveways.

NewDay USA, a major lender to veterans and servicemembers, now allows some documents to be signed electronically at home on the borrower’s computer. But the five most important documents are delivered to the front door by a notary. As long as you can be seen signing them, they are verified and notarized from a safe distance.

Notarize, a platform for digital notarizations -- which saw its business jump four-fold in March and has $23 billion in real estate transactions ordered for April, according to one report -- is trying to hire 1,000 notaries in Florida, Nevada, Texas and Virginia.

And in Chicago, Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices is using “Zero Touch” video signing to close sales through its affiliated title company.

New and existing houses aren’t selling like they were prior to the pandemic. But people are still selling and buying houses.

In January and February, the market was heading toward its best year in ages. New construction was selling at about 14% over the first two months of 2019, and existing places were changing hands at a rate not seen since early 2007. But then the business all but shut down, even though real estate is considered an essential economic activity in most places.

According to the latest information from the National Association of Home Builders, most builders say COVID-19 has curtailed traffic at model homes -- often dramatically. Builders have already experienced a 20% drop in sales compared to last year, according to the RCLCO advisory firm, and they are bracing for a 50% drop by summer.

Meanwhile, the National Association of Realtors reports that 9 in 10 of its members have seen a decline in buyer interest in resale houses. Half of those Realtors have seen drops of 50% or more. Most buyers are delaying their purchases for a few months, but some are out of the market indefinitely. (The figures cited here are national; your market may be markedly different.)

Nevertheless, some buyers and sellers are soldiering on.

“Deals are still happening. There’s been a lot of really good activity,” reports Coldwell Banker agent Jill Eber in Miami-Dade County, Florida.

Aaron Kirman, a Compass agent in Beverly Hills, California, says he’s currently working on eight or nine deals. Fellow Beverly Hills agent Joyce Rey, with Coldwell Banker, has four deals under contract at the moment.

Pending home sales in Sarasota County, Florida, were up 69% in the first two weeks of April compared to the first two weeks of March. That’s especially promising, because in that market, the first half of the month is often weaker than the last, reports agent Robert Goldman of Michael Saunders & Co. in Venice, Florida.

Still, there is no denying that sales have cratered overall. But if you are a serious buyer or seller, now may be as good a time as any to go for it.

Some tips for sellers:

-- People who are looking right now are serious buyers. They’re not tire-kickers who visit open houses on the weekends for fun.

-- With so many sellers taking their houses off the market, you have less competition right now than at any time in the past year.

-- You stand a better change of getting your asking price, or something close to it, now than sometime down the road. No one knows what the future holds, but if the pandemic lasts too many more months, experts expect prices to tumble.

-- You may not need to show your house in person. NAR says 25% of its members worked with at least one buyer in mid-April who made an offer on a place they never physically visited. “If a buyer wants to buy,” says Kirman, “I think you have a greater chance of getting a better deal today than in three months. I’d rather be ahead of the curve.”

Tips for buyers:

-- Honest-to-goodness sellers may be anxious, so make your best offer and see what happens. “If you identify a property you really love, go for it,” advises Eber. “Make an offer. I don’t have a crystal ball, but if you wait, there won’t be enough properties to satisfy the pent-up demand.”

-- There are fewer buyers in the market, so you, too, have less competition. That means you might be able to be a tad more discerning, advises Jay Parker of Douglas Elliman Real Estate in South Florida.

-- There are going to be hurdles along the way. Some lenders, though not all, are exercising caution: raising their minimum credit score and down payment requirements.

-- Seeing houses in person could be problematic. “Virtual tours are important,” says Tim Sullivan of Meyers Research, a new home market advisory firm. “But they don’t take the place of an in-person visit.”

Be that as it may, many realty agents already had programs such a virtual tours in place prior to the pandemic, and those who didn’t are adding them as quickly as they can. Ditto for appraisers, title companies, closing agents and the like.

-- Mortgage rates have dipped to their lowest level in decades. As of this writing, the Mortgage Bankers Association pegged the 30-year, fixed-rate loan at 3.45%. But Freddie Mac says it slipped to 3.31% in mid-April. “It’s practically free money,” says loan broker Grant Stern of Morningside Mortgage in Miami.

However, actually securing financing at a decent price may be a formidable challenge. Many lenders are taking and processing applications electronically, but risk-sharing overlay fees on top of loan rates have tripled since the beginning of last year, reports Karan Kaul of the Urban Institute. That adds to the cost of the loan.

At the same time, if you don’t feel comfortable dabbling while most people are staying home and social-distancing, there’s nothing wrong at all with playing a waiting game. Realize, though, that the housing market is very likely to be much different a few months from now than it is today.

If you are intent on buying a home during the pandemic, obtaining an appraisal shouldn’t stand in your way. But procuring a home inspection may be another question.

In New York, California and other states, real estate agents, appraisers and home inspectors are considered “essential employees.” But others aren’t so lenient. Pennsylvania, for example, has prohibited in-person appraisals, inspections and even final walk-throughs.

Even where these necessary tasks are allowed, though, professionals must follow statewide health mandates and adhere to local rules, which may be more restrictive.

To do their jobs, appraisers are using technology to value properties instead of taking a firsthand look around. But independent inspectors can’t do that. They have to crawl over, under and inside your house to create their reports, and they have to do so in person. There’s nothing yet that would allow them to do otherwise.

For the uninitiated, there are major differences between appraisals and home inspections. You pay for both, but that’s where the similarities end.

Appraisers work on behalf of lenders to assign a valuation to the property they are lending against. Their work tells lenders, should they have to foreclose because you fail to make your payments, what the place should be worth when the lender repossesses it for resale.

Home inspectors are hired by buyers -- and sometimes sellers, too -- to go over the house from stem to stern to determine whether the place is structurally sound, whether the systems are in good working order and whether there are any material defects that impact the home’s livability.

If what the inspector finds is not satisfactory, you can back out of the deal, or you can negotiate with the seller about how to fix the house’s issues. You can demand that the seller make and pay for the repairs, for example, or perhaps you can split the cost.

By comparison, there is no bargaining with appraisers, unless they are way, way off base. They set the value, and the bank will not lend anything more than a percentage of that amount -- take it or leave it. There are ways to protest the valuation, but they rarely work. So if the appraisal comes in too low, the buyer has to come up with more cash or the seller has to lower the price.

To keep home sales afloat as people deal with social distancing, federal regulators have loosened the rules considerably. Under the new, but temporary, criteria, exterior-only appraisals or valuations powered by artificial intelligence -- aka “desktop” appraisals -- are permissible. That way, appraisers need not go inside.

And now, three federal regulators have said that for the next year, banks do not need an appraisal until up to 120 days after the loans have closed. But that applies only to institutions they regulate, and only those loans they keep in their portfolios, as opposed to selling them to investors. There’s no word yet on whether other lending overseers will follow suit.

The authorities have encouraged lenders to accept truncated appraisals, but some, worried about potential repercussions, have balked. So appraisers are turning to sellers for help, asking them to photograph their home’s interiors and upload the pictures so they can obtain as close a look as possible until the pandemic ends.

Toward that end, several companies have come out with software to improve the process. With one from Bradford Technologies, the appraiser shares a unique link with the seller, who uses it to submit geo-coded photos of the home’s interior. The seller is led through a series of questions, such as, “Have any upgrades been made to the kitchen or baths?” and “How old is the roof?”

Founder Jeff Bradford says he knows of some appraisers who are still performing interior inspections, even though “it’s a dangerous time to do so.” If they are carrying the coronavirus, even if they’re asymptomatic, they are “like bees pollinating an orchard” as they go from house to house, he says.

Home inspectors don’t have the luxury of working from home, but some are soldiering on. With fewer sales being recorded, you’d think they’d be readily available to take on assignments. But that’s not always the case.

Bill Walker, a third-generation home inspector in the Washington, D.C., area, says two of his inspectors won’t come to work, and he and his other inspector will only examine totally vacant houses.

Walker normally probes five or six houses a week; now he’s lucky to do three. And he’s requiring sellers to sign hold-harmless agreements “so they can’t blame us if they get the virus.”

“Normally, this is at a time of year when our phones are ringing off the hook. By Sunday night, you’d book the entire week,” he says. “But now, calls are way down, more than 50 percent off. We could do more inspections, but the virus is now part of the equation.”

Meanwhile, the big home-inspection chains like Pillar to Post and HouseMasters are requiring their franchisees to follow all CDC guidelines: Practice safe distancing, wash hands, wear masks and gloves and sanitize all surfaces. But even at that, says HouseMaster’s Kathleen Kuhn, some sellers won’t allow anyone inside.

HouseMasters inspectors now sometimes ask owners to leave the house while they perform their exams. And if they can’t be gone for the three or four hours an inspection typically takes, they are asked to isolate themselves in one part of the house and stay away from the inspector. In some instances, examiners just look at exteriors. “At least clients are getting some information,” say Kuhn.

Kuhn says some of her franchisees, especially those who are older or have underlying illnesses, have shut down until the pandemic subsides. “We’ve seen other significant declines in our 40 years,” she says. “But never anything like this. It’s pretty bad.”