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The real estate industry has changed dramatically since the COVID-19 pandemic. Consumers expect faster, more convenient transactions, and lenders have adopted smarter tools in order to keep up. Here are some of the technologies reshaping home appraisals.
Automated valuations
Automated Valuation Models (AVMs) use sales and other data to provide accurate estimates of property values in real time. They work best in populated areas, which have lots of comparable sales for the AVM to use. Lenders have embraced this technology for fast, accurate and cost-effective valuations of homes.
AVMs aren’t just for home purchases and sales—they can also help speed up mortgage refinance deals. More mortgage brokers are taking advantage of the market by diversifying their businesses and driving up their volume of mortgage refinances. Those brokers provide their clients the fast and accurate service they expect with the help of automated home valuation technology.
Appraisal data solutions
Appraisers used to spend a lot of their time gathering the data to generate reports, but that doesn’t pay their bills—their analysis and judgement do. Data solutions have changed the game for real estate appraisal by taking on that step of the process.
A good solution like FCT’s Golden Record puts hundreds of data points for a property at appraisers’ fingertips, without them ever needing to leave their desks. It lets property appraisers focus on what they do best: fast, high-accuracy valuations. And to do that properly, an appraisal solution needs access to the best data.
A national property database
Real estate data in Canada used to be local and sometimes unreliable. It used to be exclusively provided by regional services gathering surface-level information about properties. Without a Single Source of Truth (SSoT) for the industry, data wasn’t able to provide the clarity professionals needed.
Lenders working across different regions couldn’t be sure that a given data point meant the same thing on properties in different areas. Agents working on the same transaction using different data services couldn’t be sure they were looking at the same thing as each other.
That’s now changed, with the introduction of an SSoT for Canada’s real estate industry: Data Tree. It provides a shared point of reference using a nation-wide property database, so that each agent in a transaction can be confident that they’re working from the same information as everyone else.
The valuations industry has been ready for change for a long time. Now the change is here, and we at FCT are excited to be able to offer more solutions with our suite of valuations products. Learn about FCT’s cascading model for property valuations and how to get smarter, faster and safer appraisals on every deal.
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