Sites managing more appraisals than ever, faster than ever

Mercury Network servers routed more than 1,565,000 appraisal reports in May, the sixth busiest month ever. Our servers have reliably delivered more than 5,167,000 reports in the last three months, an annual clip of more than 20 million appraisals.

Server traffic is growing in two ways, one you can guess and one you may not think about. The most obvious is: More lenders and brokers are doing business with appraisers through appraisers' Appraiser XSites. In the four weeks ending Sunday, more than 14,300 appraisal orders were placed through XSites, by paying clients (For an average fee of between $370 and $380.) And while that's a fraction of the orders that the Mercury Network handles – you'd have to add in orders placed through RealEC, Calyx(r) loan origination software, directly through Mercury on the web, and so on – it's an impressive figure, that's growing all the time.

The second, and we estimate more pervasive, way traffic continues to grow is through Mercury appraisers and XSite owners using the system to manage their assignment workflow. The primary value of the Mercury Network and your XSite has always been its usefulness in organizing, keeping track of, alerting clients about the status of, and delivering assignments.

When appraisers set up and begin using their XSite, more often than not they find themselves adding clients to the Network themselves, to deliver better quality and more reliable service, updates and reports. In turn, lender clients with newly-created XSite accounts begin taking advantage of organized status messaging, SureReceipts secure report delivery, and soon, XSites' document manager, which allows them to fax paper documents to a toll-free number, where our Mercury servers convert it into a digital file and route it to the appraiser; mobile messaging; and more.

Friday, we optimized Mercury's backend SQL servers, including some code and query changes, that increased the speed of tasks on the Network by more than 100 times. So there's never been a better time to start taking advantage of your XSite's workflow management features!

We'd like to hear from XSites users about how their existing clients have taken to their XSite to do business with them. Did you have to overcome any objections or obstacles? What's been your clients' favorite XSites feature? Let us know by writing the editor, mattb@alamode.com. mattb@alamode.com.