To: All WinTOTAL Aurora (version 5) users
From: Adam Calvery, VP Appraisal Products, a la mode, inc.
Re: New forms and other important items
Today's WinTOTAL Aurora update is now available on our servers. To download it, click the "Get Updates" button on the toolbar in your Appraisal Desktop.
This release includes the newest addition to the General Purpose forms series, the GP Consumer. We've received a lot of great feedback on it. Here are some highlights:
The long form is modular and contains all the usual approaches to value, making it highly flexible. The short version contains only a sales comparison approach, and is designed to be a replacement for many cases where you might currently be using the old 2055 form. We’ve also made a GP Consumer styled competing listings form that you can include with either version. I highly recommend using this form when marketing to non-lender clients and broadening your marketing to include homeowners. For those of you with XSites and XSellerate, don't forget you can export addresses from your Appraisal Desktop and print out Current Resident "Time for a new appraisal" letters. This new GP form is perfect for that kind of marketing. For instructions, click here.
That's it for today's update, but there are a few important items I need to touch on briefly:
We've pushed back the release of our Microsoft Virtual Earth aerial mapping integration. The integration works well, but we're going to leave it in beta testing for another update cycle to ensure a seamless release. We're excited about this because none of our competitors have this integration, and you'll get it free.
DaVinci's release will be in the very near future too. When released, all customers will get the desktop integrated version, for free, in an update. So if you have a licensed copy of WinTOTAL, you'll also have our sketcher as well, even on networked machines. Elite customers will get the DaVinci Pro Mobile version for free as well. This is our new field data and sketching application built for tablet and ultra mobile PCs. If you haven't seen what it can do, visit the labs site to learn more.
Last, we did an informal nationwide survey to 170 loan originators and mortgage brokers last week. We wanted to know what will influence them to order more appraisals from you, which in turn gives us a better idea of what tools to build and focus on. For example, this survey told us 81.3% would rather get report status by e-mail instead of over the phone. So clearly the automated status e-mails XSites kick out matter to them, and that's something we could look at improving or training our customers on.
But that survey got us wondering what YOU would like to survey mortgage brokers about. Reply to this e-mail with your questions, we'll put together a survey, send it out next week, and post the results in the middle of November.
That's it for today. You'll notice today's update notes are short. We'll be focused on finishing up the Virtual Earth integration and DaVinci over the next 30-45 days, and then roll back into bug fixes and improvements for the December update. As always, thanks for your time and your business, and don't hesitate to shoot me any questions or comments.
Adam Calvery
VP, Appraisal Products
a la mode, inc.
adam@alamode.com
WinTOTAL Aurora (v5) - November 1, 2007 Update
Our latest GP form, the GP Consumer, is now available for use. This unique form is available in both a long and short form version, and is specifically designed for jobs that require a more presentation oriented look and feel. For complete details on the form, visit www.alamode.com/gp.
New Forms:
General: