Six months and counting: Getting you ready for UMDP
Phil Perkins, Executive Vice President, Products
labs@alamode.com
We had a team in Washington, DC earlier this week meeting with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on their upcoming Uniform Mortgage Data Program UAD. From what we gathered, all systems are still a "go" for the September 1st deadline for the appraisal portion of the UAD. That's less than six months away, so today we're kicking off a multi-article series from now through the end of summer to make sure you're ready for any curveballs UMDP might throw at you.
If you haven't spent any time looking over the information Fannie has published on UMDP, I'd set aside some time this weekend to go through it here. Specifically, you'll want to look at the Uniform Appraisal Dataset (UAD for short). That's the piece of UMDP that's going to affect you the most.
In short, the UAD is a program intended to standardize key components in the appraisal report. Much of what's becoming standard isn't a huge deal. Standardizing things like date formats (mm/dd/yyyy) and currency fields won't change your workflow much. But there are a few others that will have a bigger impact on how you work. In the next several labs newsletters, I'm going to let you know about some of those bigger items and give you insight into how TOTAL 2011 and WinTOTAL Aurora will help get you compliant. Today we'll take on the issues of data formats and picklists.
Of the 61 fields in Fannie's standardizing crosshairs, many are simple date, currency, number, and percentage fields. When you think about it, there are a number of different ways to enter dates. And you probably have your own preferred way of writing them. So they have chosen a standardized format of mm/dd/yyyy. To get a head start, when you're entering a date, you may want to go ahead and adapt to that format now.
For number formats like currency or gross living area there are a couple of variations. Some allow decimal precision, while others require whole numbers only. The problem, of course, is keeping up with which formats go where. So we've put some slick features into WinTOTAL Aurora and TOTAL 2011 to help. Whenever you accidentally enter an incorrect format, we'll give you a quick reminder and then get out of the way so you can get back to work.
As you can imagine, any project with the goal of standardizing anything is going to require a picklist here and there. The UAD is no different. Transaction type, for example, is now a required picklist item with seven selections: REO Sale, Short Sale, Court Ordered Sale, Estate Sale, Relocation Sale, Non-Arms Length Sale, and Arms Length Sale. There are several other instances covered in Fannie's documentation. There isn't anything particularly earth shattering about this change. You'll now choose the transaction type from a picklist rather than entering it free-form, which shouldn't have a big impact on your workflow.
In the next labs newsletter, we'll get into some of the trickier picklists -- namely things like view, quality of construction, and condition. There are some new requirements there that you'll want to start thinking about soon.
The good news for a la mode customers is that we'll have UMDP-compliant updates ready for download next month. And what's cool is that you'll be able to toggle the UAD compliance features on and off as you work on your reports. That way you can begin adjusting workflow and getting accustomed to the new formats now. If you use another software you'll probably want to make sure you've got that option available to you as well.
In our next labs newsletter (on March 18th), I'll get more in depth on picklists and show you what the new reports will look like when they're UMDP compliant. After that, we'll get into the advantages of our desktop UAD rules engine, the role of MISMO XML, and how you'll deliver your reports. It's going to be a busy summer getting ready for these changes, but I'm quite confident that if you stick with us, you'll be a UAD master well before September 1st.
