Real appraiser stories

"We've been in business for 15 years, but we really started using XSellerate eight years ago. It came as part of our Elite System, so I took one of those free half hour a la mode webinars just to see what it was all about. I'm very glad I did!

It took me about an hour to get familiar with XSellerate and get everything started. I began by looking at all the campaigns a la mode has already put together, and I knew we could grow our business with these. I set up a campaign for all of our contacts to receive an e-mail around every holiday, just wishing them the best and reminding them of our services. The holiday campaign was already set up inside XSellerate, so it took me about four minutes to turn it on. After it's "on", I don't have to do anything else – they just go out automatically to our contact list. The result is that we're reaching out to all our contacts about once a month with a nice marketing message, so we stay on their minds and they send referrals constantly.

We also use all the campaigns in XSellerate targeted for attorneys, and we get several orders weekly from those ads. Those assignments are a great market to break into and XSellerate does it automatically for us.

Over time, we've built our contact list to over 2,000 e-mail addresses. We send to real estate agents, lenders at credit unions and local banks, plus our regular clients. (Click here to read about how Anne built her contacts list.) It's funny, but several of our contacts edit the ads we send and then send them out to their own prospects.

From XSellerate, we get a new order every other day, minimum. We just got a referral yesterday with two orders and they're full fee attorney estate orders. I recommend it because it pays for itself with the first order and the rest is just extra business that we wouldn't have had otherwise. It's a tremendously valuable asset to us."

"In less than 24 hours, I had purchased, installed, and was using the XSite.  The same day my XSite webpage was activated, I received my first assignment based on the website -- a $500.00 forensic review.  I now have a professional website where I have already received orders that have caused me to recoup the fee of setting it up.

I really like the XSite, I like the way I can plug in my own fees and coverage areas.  The biggest surprise, for a non-techie like me (one who has never had a lesson in computer technology), is how easy it is to use … just like all a la mode products. 

Let’s put it this way, it’s paid for itself.  I’ve got a new client, new orders, and clients that seek me out.  Since I am a very small business, that saves time and money.  It’s a wise business decision that will bring in additional clients and revenue.  It’s worth every penny it cost. 

I’ve been an a la mode member since 1992. Up to that point I was doing reports on a typewriter. You can imagine the challenge that was. I was up sometimes until 2AM typing and retyping.  Being a really small shop, I have depended on a la mode to keep me up to date.  With every change or upgrade, a la mode has been there. 

In 20 years I have only taken two training classes.  That is how easy it is for a non-techie like me to use the products, and how great tech support has always been.”

"We've always pushed against convention, embracing technologies before our competitors did so that we'd be more efficient and profitable. As a matter of fact, until we moved to the a la mode platform, we had coded our own custom software to solve specific challenges from our unique housing market. But the industry changed so rapidly over the past five years that we needed help. We looked at the appraisal products available and decided to move our business to a la mode, which carried our technology torch but was much more cost effective than doing everything ourselves.

WinTOTAL is the core of our valuation efforts. It's really our business engine. We run our company on it and it works as advertised. It helps us with efficiency and also helps us maintain the highest level of quality that our clients expect. Specifically, we're huge fans of the comp side-by-side comparison interface in WinTOTAL. It allows us to look at a large number of adjusted sales at once.

When appraisers ask me what we use to run our company, I always say WinTOTAL. It's “real-world” tested on a highly productive office like ours, and I enthusiastically recommend it.

With powerful software like WinTOTAL, we get more time to focus on the analytical valuation part of our job, which is far more important (and more fun, actually). Reduction of the clerical demands of appraising is so important, and it's a huge benefit of using WinTOTAL.

Another benefit of a la mode's products is that they've helped adjust our business when needed, too. I was very public on my blog and podcast about the coming credit crunch back during the middle of the decade. I knew it was going to end badly so I made a conscious decision to aggressively reduce our over-dependency on appraisals from retail banking clients and develop new sources of business. As a result, our firm has been contrarian to the industry trend over the last three years -- it's been a strong period for us. Our a la mode software has been an important part of that success."