What do shortcuts really cost appraisers? If you haven’t had a vacation in the last year, consider reading on.
There’s always another report due.
Does “I need to get that appraisal out” stop you from improving your process?
In software development, technical debt is necessary work that gets delayed in order to hit a deadline. Technical debt is the coding you must do tomorrow because you took a shortcut today.
Commercial fee and bank appraisers typically have a huge amount of “debt” in the form of mountains of manually tasks that lack automation. No process.
Cost of shortcuts
Appraisers need to order, create and review reports at an increasing pace. Is the ROI there for you to slow down and take the time resulting in moving your firm or appraisal department forward?
“Debt” for fee appraisers includes, manually typing in comps in Excel adjustment grids, manually making comp maps, lacking an effective comp database, no report writing automation, copy/pasting 1,000x per report and managing your entire office with emails.
The result: lost hours, constantly fighting back typos, tired internal reviewers and late reports.
“Debt” for appraisal managers include manually tracking vendor credentials, inconsistent engagement letters, back and forth emails with RMs, fee appraisers and reviewers. Constantly juggling numerous appraisals underway with no real time single dashboard view.
The result: constantly being pinged by RMs asking the status of appraisals while you’re hoping no reports fall through the cracks.
Opportunity costs
Digital transformation sounds like just a buzzword. Those that don’t take it seriously are working way too much, stressed out handling too many things and exhausted by the manual tasks repeated daily, multiplied by the number of staff.
6 Digital Transformation Rewards
- Reduce your exhaustive manual tasks.
- Attract and keep younger talent.
- Relinquish your burden of keeper of all knowledge.
- Create a sellable appraisal business.
- Provide your C-Suite management metrics.
- Give regulators auditable information.
Being commercial appraisers gave us the nuanced knowledge to create DataComp Suite, a commercial comp database, report writing and in-house management workflow application.
It also provides great insight working with financial institutions with YouConnect, our enterprise appraisal and environmental workflow platform. It’s rewarding to help our clients improve their internal processes and meet their SLAs.
“It’s impactful to work with companies like Realwired to bridge between IT and the business of appraising.”
Determine and assess
What’s important is to understand there’s no one software that fixes everything. It takes an understanding of the various tools made available but also determine and assess. It’s further complicated that there are multiple needs of an appraisal firm or appraisal department.
Digital enablement roadmap
The goal of every commercial appraisal firm and appraisal department should be the same. Digital transformation has less to do with technology and more about automating business process.
Take the time to change how you work day-to-day to create repeatable processes. Take the time to invest your brain power into data analytics. Take the time to have a solid road map.
Determine where you are in your digital enablement road map.
Necessary work gets delayed in order to hit a deadline. As appraisers, we always have deadlines.
Is it time to pay your “debt” for a (much) better tomorrow?
Consider the opportunity costs for you and your team.
What’re shortcuts costing you?
