Real Estate Solutions
Today more so than ever, the real estate valuation business sector is hot. PDSA
has designed and built technologies to automate the workflow between lending institutions,
the valuation organization and the brokers/appraisers who perform the valuation
data capture. What is critical is reducing the span time, reducing the operational
costs, improving valuation quality and increasing revenue. PDSA has successfully
increased value for its customers. PDSA has developed an extensive real estate valuation
solution.
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What is a BPO?
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Real estate appraisal, property valuation or land valuation is the practice of developing
an opinion of the value of real property, usually its market value. There is a gradient
of “appraisals” in the industry: a full blown appraisal or a broker price opinion
(BPO). Broker’s Price Opinion, or BPO, is a method that a real estate broker uses
to estimate the probable selling price of a real estate property/house. The estimate
of price is submitted in a BPO report (2-3 pages) that includes local and regional
real estate market information, neighborhood analysis, and comparable properties
(comps) that compare to the house (subject) that is being evaluated. This method
of estimating a selling price has similarities to a Certified Market Analysis CMA
and a residential real estate appraisal.
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What’s Needed in a BPO Application?
There are numerous data elements to capture for a property valuation. Many of the
systems today capture data as ‘free text.’ Free text is simply the characters with
no inherent meaning. For example, a data field could be entered as 4/34/2009 and
no error would be triggered because April does not have 34 days. That is a simple
case and maybe most systems handle that. But how about a more complicated one: all
sales comps must be with 5 miles of the subject property. How do you do that? Trust
the broker to estimate that correctly? Certainly not. You must use geocoding to
accurately ensure the sales comp is within the required range as specified by the
customer. What other customer rules might there be? Required photos, comment presets,
and actually 1,000s of business rules to ensure the highest quality BPO.
Is Workflow Important?
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Electronic workflow management is critical! By reducing work flow time spans and
electronically delivering information, you can quickly save time and money. Brokers
can log on to the system, determine what work they wish to perform, enter all the
necessary information and photos, ensure proper data validation and send the completed
BPO back to the requesting institution. After each broker logs in, he/she can see
his/her work queue which shows each BPO assigned to him, open issues, statuses,
etc.
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Why Quality Data Reduces Costs
Typical and older systems that supported the BPO domain had little to no data validations.
Hence, the BPO report would be returned, reviewed, tagged/rejected and sent back
to the broker for corrections. This could happen numerous times for EACH BPO. This
process drove costs up, labor up, paper usage up, and elapsed time way up. The approach
is to inform the broker of the data errors/issues locally to him/her BEFORE the
BPO is returned for inspection. How do you do that? By designing a system that supports
an extensible and scalable rule-based validation engine: this saves time and money.
Using Geocoding Intelligently
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Geocoding is an important element of a quality BPO. Geocoding may sound easy but
it has many complexities. Difficulties arise when distinguishing between ambiguous
addresses such as 742 Evergreen Terrace and 742 W Evergreen Terrace or you are attempting
to geocode new addresses for a street that is not yet added to the geographic information
system database. Hence, it is important to use a company such as PDSA which has
a rich experience in producing the highest hit rate possible based on your particular
needs. We’ve even found that using the same address and calling different geocode
services sometimes yield different addresses in completely different areas, so we
need to examine the results to select the more reasonable one. We’ve also found
that the same service may return more than one address, leaving it up to the consumer
to decide which is best for their use.
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Quality BPOs, Greater Profits – The Goal
In summary, by looking at your business model and where your business wants to go,
PDSA can develop the business cases, system architectures, designs, and implementation
and support to enable your business and revenue to grow.