The goal of every real estate professional is to get an acceptable offer signed, sealed and delivered. That's when you get your fee.

When I first became licensed in the late 1970s, my Barton & Ludwig office did not have a fax machine. They were not in wide use at that time, so we did everything in person or by courier.

I remember my first year as an agent. I would stay out late delivering contracts after all parties signed them because I did not want to run the risk that a nervous buyer or a remorseful seller might change their mind.

It was not unusual for me to run up a courier bill of several hundred dollars. It was either pay the courier or deliver it myself, and sometimes it was more efficient to pay the courier.

So it was with great fanfare that the facsimile machine was introduced to our office.

I always thought it was amazing that every real estate office in America apparently went out and bought a fax machine on the very same day. The procedure of "faxing" a contract became as common as making a phone call. It was also as cheap.

Computer-savvy agents will want to know about two neat services I have found to take the paper trail one step further. One is Maxemail, a service that assigns you a dedicated Atlanta phone number that answers with a fax tone. You can use it for all your incoming faxes or you can selectively forward faxes to it when you choose. The service is at www.maxemail.com on the Internet.

For about $6 a month, your incoming faxes are converted to e-mail attachments and forwarded to your e-mail inbox, wherever that may be. And you save the cost of a dedicated fax line.

I recently sat at an Internet café in Brussels, Belgium, and reviewed, with remarkable clarity, an offer contract that had been faxed to me in Atlanta minutes earlier. Because Internet access is so common worldwide, this service makes it easy to be anywhere and still conduct business.

The second great new service involves Portable Document Format files. This type of file can be printed by just about anyone who has any kind of computer, and that's just about anyone. And now you can create these PDF files for free.

PDF was originally developed by Adobe Systems as a way for businesses to share documents across differing brands of software, and it works remarkably well. But until now, you had to buy expensive software to create the PDF documents.

A new program called CUTEpdf Printer lets you create PDF documents for free from any Windows-based application, and that is a breakthrough in the cost of technology. The program is available at www.acrosoftware.com and it works well. An upgrade is available but isn't needed.

With these two pieces of technology, you can receive an incoming fax in your e-mail, save it as a PDF document, then e-mail it to anyone anywhere in the world as a "portable document" within seconds, all for free (almost).

The bottom line here is that the world is getting smaller. What used to cost a bundle and take several hours can now be accomplished for peanuts in seconds.

I honestly don't know who to thank for this, but, on behalf of all the licensed real estate agents in the world, not to mention all buyers and sellers, I appreciate it.

The concept of a "portable document" never occurred to me in 1979, but it has become part of everyday life.

If you have found other technology that makes real estate marketing or management easier or faster, please feel free to share it with me at my Web site listed at the end of my column.

Q: Where can I get a standard Georgia real estate contract?

A: The most widely used forms for real estate sales are created by the Georgia Association of Realtors for the use of their members.

The GAR forms are well-written and, with a few notable exceptions, clear and easy to understand.

Because the purchase and sale of real property is such an important event and because so much money is at stake, it doesn't make sense to try to write binding contracts by yourself, even if you have a copy of the GAR forms.

I strongly recommend that you seek guidance from a real estate attorney or that you hire a real estate agent to help you fill in the blanks.

While real estate agents are not qualified to give legal advice or practice law, they often are skilled at helping the buyer and seller come to a "meeting of the minds," then using the GAR forms to confirm the agreement in writing.

It is penny-wise and pound-foolish to try to save a few bucks by going to the office supply store and buying a generic sales contract that might not be valid in this state.

John Adams is a broker and investor. He is the host of the "John Adams Radio Show," a call-in program dealing with homeownership and real estate, from 1 to 3 p.m. Saturdays on WGST-AM (640). For more real estate information or to make a comment, visit www.money99.com.