Featured news — posted September 28, 2004 The new "hub" of your appraisal business Appraiser websites have a bad reputation. Some of you say, "I don't need to advertise," or "it won't help my business," or "I don't have time to mess with a website." And many of you have been burned by someone else's expensive website that didn't actually "do anything." We're changing all of that. With our new Appraiser XSites, you'll have a tool that's more than a website and just as vital as your formfilling software. Just as digital cameras and EDI changed the way you do business, so will XSites. In fact, your XSite will become the new "hub" or your business. XSites' new "My Office" area is your dashboard to run a more efficient business. It puts all of our timesaving tools at your fingertips. From there, you can build your site in about 15 minutes and make it complete with online ordering and credit card processing. You'll log into your XSite daily to manage tasks like order tracking and client communication. It integrates seamlessly with other products like WinTOTAL so formfilling is done faster. Your website is now more than just an online yellow page ad. Now your website works for you, boosting your efficiency. It "does something." Actually, it does a lot of things. Your clients find you through your XSite, type in subject property information and place an order for an appraisal report. You download the information into WinTOTAL, and every step of the way, status is relayed to your XSite which in turn keeps your clients notified through email and mobile notifications and daily status reports — inspection appointment made, inspection completed, report completed. The completed report is delivered through a secure area of your XSite. You manage your many orders in their various stages through the XSite Order Manager, the next generation of Mercury Desktop. It's a snap to learn, and you are able to receive online orders from your XSite's order form. Your existing customers will love the convenience and confidence from placing orders on your site and receiving status messages. Custom delivery plugins for major lenders and management companies reduce the amount of phone tag by making sure your reports conform to your client's review guidelines before they're ever transmitted. Specialized delivery plugins like sure receipts avoid the pitfalls of sending appraisal reports as attachments and give you instant notification when a client receives your report. Imagine a whole range of mobile tools integrated into WinTOTAL and your Enterprise level XSite. Subject property data, such as flood determinations and location maps, are available in the field. WinTOTAL Aurora comps information from your comps database is available in the field, too, when that's released. All of this information at your fingertips is organized, analyzed and uploaded into WinTOTAL with little or no rekeying once you're back in your office. You can check for new orders, send status reports to your clients, check your e-mail, schedule appointments and more, all in the field. You receive payment via credit card, either on your Enterprise-level XSite when your client places an order, or at the door with a mobile device if the order is C.O.D. Merchant account application fees are included with your Enterprise XSite, and applying couldn't be easier. Once you have an account, no more worrying about bad checks or non payments. This is all coming true in the coming weeks. In response to strong customer demand, we're making different levels of XSites available, to accommodate the different needs of our appraiser customers. Everyone who owns an XSite now gets a Professional level XSite for free. You may upgrade to Enterprise level. Customers who have taken advnatage of our Elite bundle get an Enterprise level XSite for free. Appraisers who are new to online business generation and management and who want to get their feet wet can opt for a Standard XSite, which includes XSites Order Manager, themes to choose from, client logins, report delivery and 24/7 support. Professional and Enterprise users get detailed, intuitive contact and schedule management tools. Place pre-built lead capture forms ("Contact Me") on any page of your website with just a click. When a prospect submits their information, it's automatically added to your new CertMail contacts database. Your prospects receive an instant, customizable auto-responder message from you and the lead information is sent directly to your e-mail address. You get detailed web traffic statistics, so you can see who's finding you, how they got there and what pages are most popular on your site. And you'll have access to the new XSites User Forum, where you can exchange ideas, upload documents or "chat" with other appraisers that use XSites to help manage their business. Using the built-in search tool, you can search the forum for certain keywords and phrases and/or search a specified date range. You can also view an alphabetical listing of all the forum members. And Enterprise XSites will also include multilingual content — hand translated, pre-written content pages for non-English speaking clients and customers. You get a Flash-based, color-coded, completely customizable service area map. Custom Flash intro creation, up to 17 mortgage calculators to complement the great pre-written content on every XSite, and a header animator are also Enterprise features users can get excited about. Meanwhile your Appraiser XSite does everything you've learned a website should: It markets your services as a professional appraiser in your area. But it does that in more ways than simply "being there" to be happened upon by search engine users. With XSellerate marketing tools, your Enterprise XSite is a hub that helps you drum up business from current, past and potential clients and customers. E-mail campaigns are created and managed. Online brochures are created. You affirmatively take steps to draw clients and customers to your "public" office/storefront — your XSite. You don't just sit around and wait for them to find you on Google™. You're busy and don't have time for "marketing" and "advertising." We've been working long and hard to make your Appraiser XSite the hub of your business. It's not — has never been — just an online brochure. It's how you work, communicate with clients, bring in new business, conduct the business you have efficiently and profitably. Whichever level you choose, you'll never have looked so good to your clients. You'll never have been more productive and profitable. And your website will become more than the flag you plant on the Internet — it'll represent and function as the way you do business. More exciting details are forthcoming in the next two weeks.
Can Fannie's appraisal/valuation policies be trusted?
Do Fannie Mae's recent accounting misadventures suggest its appraisal policies need to be examined more closely? One analyst in the New York Times thinks so.
A probe into the financial practices stretching back into the 1990s of Fannie Mae by its regulator, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), found, as Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times succinctly put it, "the truth about Fannie Mae: that it is just another scheming corporation run by me-first managers."
The revelations in the meaty report on results of OFHEO's investigation included that "Fannie Mae intentionally developed accounting policies and selected and applied accounting methods to inappropriately reduce earnings volatility and provide management with the flexibility to determine the amount of income and expense recognized in any accounting period."
Fannie's auditor, KPMG, aided the GSE's officers by identifying hundreds of millions in losses as an "audit difference," the report said. This, OFHEO charged, meant that Fannie's chief executives could still collect huge bonuses that would have been considerably smaller had the losses been recognized when they should have — for example, $1.9 million and $1.1 million bonuses received by then Chairman and CEO James Johnson in 1998 and by Franklin Raines, then the Chairman and CEO designate.
Four other Fannie executives — Lawrence Small, Jamie Gorelick (who went on to become one of the 10 members of the 9/11 Commission), Tim Howard and Robert Levin — shared another $3,270,384 in bonuses in 1998 alone, on top of their $2.1 million in salaries.
OFHEO investigators said they found a pattern of Fannie "not recogniz[ing] estimated income or expense up to certain thresholds" and would "defer the recognition of income or expense that exceeded recommended thresholds over a several year planning horizon" in order primarily to boost officer bonuses. OFHEO found that Fannie was mostly a straight shooter when it came to estimated income, but contorted and distorted estimated expenses.
In a damning statement, OFHEO's report said "The practice and the latitude within the policy that authorized it meant that [Fannie Mae] was no longer making adjustments to improve the accuracy of its reported financial results. Rather, the Enterprise was making preemptive adjustments for the sole purpose of managing prospective earnings."
OFHEO said it is "not aware of any basis in promulgated accounting standards that would support this accounting treatment."
Monday, OFHEO announced that Fannie Mae agreed to address improper accounting by, among other things, implementing accepted accounting standards, undertaking a "top-to-bottom review of staff structure, responsibilities, independence of functions, compensation and incentives," and appointing an independent chief risk officer and separate other key business functions.
All this academic, eco-speak, this-week's-accounting-scandal flavor of the Fannie Mae story was brought to appraisers' ground level in the Times article. Josh Rosner, a financial services analyst at Medley Global Advisors, a policy and regulatory research firm in New York, told the Times that "If allegations that they engineered systems for growth without regard to safety and soundness are correct, other systems, including underwriting, appraisal and loss mitigation systems should be called into question as well."
When it was suggested anonymously by AVM vendors and resellers that Fannie was accepting AVMs in lieu of appraisals — see our coverage here — we told you the story wasn't new, and besides, economic and mortgage industry realities would prevent AVMs from taking hold at Fannie. Americans are more encumbered by debt than ever, file bankruptcy more often, and are more delinquent on their mortgages, and yet fully half the people who would have been denied a mortgage just six years ago are approved today. What we didn't consider because we didn't know until this revelation about questionable accounting is that Fannie is in no position to risk certainty in the value of its collateral while under investigation by its regulator and the microscope of Wall Street.
All in all not the best time to plant a story about AVMs taking hold at Fannie.
AQB guides states on implementation of new Qualification Criteria
The Appraiser Qualifications Board (AQB) adopted new Real Property Appraiser Qualification Criteria on February 20, due to take effect in 2008. There have been questions from the states, the AQB said recently, about how to implement the changes. In an AQB Guide Note, the AQB gave the states two acceptable scenarios and one which would not be acceptable.
A "Firm Date Scenario" was authorized whereby any credential issued by a state appraiser regulatory body on or after January 1, 2008, must be in compliance with all components of the new AQB Real Property Appraiser Qualification Criteria, the AQB said. Under this scenario, it would not matter when an applicant completed his or her education, examination and experience; if the credential is issued after January 1, 2008, the applicant must meet the requirements for all components of the new Criteria, the Guide Note said.
A "Segmented Scenario" was also authorized, whereby the requirements are broken down into three segments (or components): Education, Experience, and Examination. An applicant would have to meet the Criteria in effect at the time he or she completes a particular component or segment, the AQB said. Any component completed prior to January 1, 2008, would satisfy the current Criteria, while any component not completed by January 1, 2008, would have to conform to the new Criteria.
By way of example, if an applicant for a Certified General credential completes all of the currently required 180 hours of qualifying education and passes the state’s Certified General examination in 2007, but does not possess the required 30 months and 3,000 hours of experience required under the new Criteria to be in force starting in 2008, since the applicant completed the education and examination components prior to January 1, 2008, he or she would be deemed to have satisfied those components.
The AQB said it was not acceptable for a state to begin the process of implementing the new Criteria until January 1, 2008. This would result in some period of time after January 1, 2008, where applicants would not be AQB compliant because the jurisdiction would not have the appropriate statutory or regulatory requirements in place, the Guide Note said.
The Guide Note is viewable at the Appraisal Foundation website, by clicking here. |
News briefs Data ownership fight blankets the real estate media Last week we told you about a data ownership battle we're fighting on a different front, but one that affects all real estate professionals, appraisers included. While we can occasionally get National Mortgage News or American Banker or the like interested in issues that impact our appraiser customers, it's funny — and impressive — how quickly the real estate media gloms on to a data issue when brokers/agents are involved. Inman News ran the first story on the issue — a subscription is required to read it now — and it remains as of this writing one of the most popular links on the Inman News home page, after spending most of last week at number one. Clearly, this is an issue that resonates with agents and brokers. Our CEO, Dave Biggers, and Homestore's President, Alan Dalton, have been invited by Inman to produce 7-8 paragraph statements of our positions in this important matter for publication side-by-side in a future Inman News article. Ours will be done shortly; hopefully, Homestore will participate as well. Realty Times covered the issue very comprehensively and objectively, in two long stories: Who Has the Right To Publish Your Listing Online? and Website Vendor-Homestore Dispute: Each Misses The Point, Says The Other. Real Estate Technology Insight covered the issue (subscription required) as well, and will feature an in-depth story in its next print edition. Appraisal Intelligence, its sister publication, ran a preview of the RETI piece in its September 27 edition (subscription required). Real Estate Intelligence Report will feature a piece on the issue in its next quarterly print edition. We received so many requests for statements or interviews that we released our own press release on the matter which can be found here. Our increased visibility in the broader real estate press is good for our customers because we've proven we have the leverage to make our customers' concerns known. We've fought on your side against companies (and trade associations) that funnel your money to AVMs, and we'll continue to fight for all our customers. It's great that the media covering our industry have come to realize that. Existing home sales down, but now "sustainable" The national median existing-home price was $190,100 in August, up 7.3 percent from August 2003 when the median price was $177,200. The median is a typical market price where half of the homes sold for more and half sold for less. Housing inventory levels at the end of August slipped 0.4 percent from July to a total of 2.48 million existing homes available for sale, which represents a 4.6-month supply at the current sales pace. Housing sales will moderate going forward as interest rates gradually rise at a moderate pace, economists at Wachovia Securities said. Housing prices may also moderate as well, but are in no danger of decline nationally. Average existing home prices are up 7.72 percent on a year-over-year basis, while median existing home prices are up 7.28 percent. "We anticipate that the annual rate at which home prices appreciate nationally will decrease will remain positive — as it always has, as long as housing prices have been recorded," Jason Schenker, Economist with Wachovia Securities, said. HUD proposes broker flipping rule Like HUD's means for expunging appraisers, once HUD decides there is cause to remove a broker, it will provide the broker with written notice and the removal takes effect 30 days later. However, brokers will have 20 days after the notice is issued to submit a written response to HUD opposing the proposed removal and to request a conference. The conference will take place within 15 days after HUD receives the request. Within 20 days after the conference, HUD will advise the real estate broker in writing of HUD's decision. Comments are requested on the proposed rule by November 16. You can see the proposal online Events Where we'll be in the coming weeks: October Seminars: Sacramento, CA Denver, CO October Hands-On Training: Oklahoma City, OK See a full schedule here. Contact the e-newsletter Don't reply! Write mattb@alamode.com Subscribe or refer a friend New here? Get on the list to get future weekly e-news. Think someone else would be interested? Send this newsletter to a friend. e-Newsletter archives e-Newsletter 9/21/04 Fighting on another data aggregation front e-Newsletter 9/14/04 Exercise caution in installing Windows XP SP2 e-Newsletter 9/7/04 Marketing more important in slowdown than ever Specials Our comprehensive product line can help you be more efficient in every area of your business. Now you can take $100 off any of our products and services that retail for $200 or more. Save on everything from XSites to WinTOTAL. You can't lose! Call 1-800-ALAMODE or write sales@alamode.com to take advantage. Hurry! Offer ends September 30.
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