MPA sat down with a la mode's Molly Dowdy to talk about Mercury Network, a la mode's premier appraisal management system.
Video transcript below:
Molly Dowdy of valuation software company – a la mode – talks to MPA about Mercury Network, a la mode’s premier appraisal management system.
Molly Dowdy, A La Mode Inc.
Well different lenders are using all kinds of different solutions for appraisal management and originators and brokers are not happy with a majority of those solutions, because they take the quality control out of the originator’s hands and places it with some national agency who may or may not be geographically competent in that area and before regulation, you know brokers and originators could, they had relationships with appraisers in their local area, that they knew were experienced and delivered good quality service and then when HVCC held in 2008 I think, they needed a firewall between production and the appraiser.
And so a lot of lenders with [immediate lease AMCs] and they just started assigning appraisers you know based who bid the job for the lowest fee. Well that endangers a lot of deals and so originators and brokers have been really unsatisfied with that solution. The reason that Mercury Network is popular with brokers and originators is that it allows them to build their own panel of trusted appraisers and then manage all their orders just within that panel. So it’s not outsourced outside of the broker or the originator’s comfort zone. They define these are the appraisers that know my area, these are the appraisers that I trust and then the software system will place orders, distribute equally in a non-predictive way. So you still have that firewall between the appraiser and production and, but you still get to work with the vendors that you trust.