a la mode Announces Orlando, Florida Regional Sales and Training Office

OKLAHOMA CITY, OK — a la mode, inc., the largest provider of software and technology to the real estate appraisal profession, announced today that it has begun construction of its first regional sales and training office in Orlando, Florida.  The company indicated that the 5,000 square foot facility should be open in early September.

Equipped with a 56 seat state of the art technology training classroom, the building is located in a brand new business park directly across the Beeline Expressway from the Orlando International Airport, with numerous hotels and restaurants nearby.  The Florida Association of REALTORS® headquarters is located in the same office complex.

The company expects to use Orlando’s superb air connections to serve its rapidly growing national appraisal user base with seminar-style and hands-on training classes, in addition to operating as a sales office to the burgeoning Florida real estate agent market.

“We’re adding nearly a thousand new software clients every month, and the classroom at our headquarters in Oklahoma City is booked solid year-round.  This is a great opportunity for our traditional appraiser clients to combine an Orlando theme park vacation with industry training,” noted Ellana Walker, a la mode’s Vice President of Marketing. “But beyond that, our new Agent XSites product line has really taken off, with Florida accounting for an astonishing 32 percent of our sales.  Since there are as many real estate agents just in Florida as there are appraisers nationwide, it makes sense to dedicate a sales office to Florida exclusively,” Walker continued.

a la mode’s new Agent XSites help agents reach buyers and sellers with websites containing sophisticated animation and management features.  Particularly attractive in South Florida is Agent XSites’ multilingual ability, which provides site content in five different languages, translated “by hand” to capture cultural nuances.  Besides serving Spanish-speaking buyers and sellers, the German, Portuguese, and French pages in an Agent XSite attract the growing contingent of European and South American buyers seeking Florida vacation homes.

As evidence of the attractiveness of Agent XSites to Florida agents, a la mode recently announced that the Pinellas REALTOR® Organization (PRO), serving over 6,000 REALTOR® members in the Tampa Bay/Saint Petersburg market, will be reselling, augmenting and supporting a la mode’s Agent XSites for its REALTOR® members.  The Orlando office will be instrumental in serving PRO’s members, as well as other REALTOR® organizations throughout Florida.  The company is in discussions with several other Florida boards.

In another Florida first, the Agent XSites system is pre-configured to tie into the various back end property listings engines powering over 85 percent of all the Multiple Listing Service® (MLS) systems in Florida, making it incredibly easy for an agent’s site to instantly contain nearly every property for sale in the agent’s local metro area, without any custom programming.  a la mode’s system enables an agent to remain in control of the end user’s experience while showing them virtually all the local listings, without inadvertently referring a potential client to a competing agent.

The company expects to employ 25 salespeople and trainers in Orlando, adding to the 150 employees at its headquarters in Oklahoma City and its Salt Lake City technology center.  The company occupies 25,000 square feet at its headquarters, and is currently expanding its Salt Lake City office to 4,000 square feet at a new location near the Salt Lake airport.  Plans are also underway for a training facility in Las Vegas and a headquarters for expansion into the growing European Union market.

a la mode has long dominated the appraisal technology sector, with over half of all real estate appraisers nationwide using its software and services.  More than 17 million appraisal reports passed through its Mercury e-commerce servers on the way to property closings in the past 12 months, making it mission critical to the hot mortgage market.  Each year, several thousand appraisers receive training in using the latest handheld, desktop, Internet, and wireless technologies at a la mode’s in-house classrooms and hotel-based seminars, and those same appraisers will form the core of the new office’s training clients.

Besides appraisers and agents, a la mode also offers products designed specifically for mortgage loan officers and brokers, as well as property inspectors.

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About a la mode

Founded in 1985, a la mode develops desktop tools, mobile tools, web sites for real estate professionals, mortgage brokers, and appraisers. a la mode’s flagship product, WinTOTAL form-filling software for appraisers leads the residential appraisal industry.  a la mode’s Mercury Network, a vendor management platform for lenders, provides the most experienced local appraisers in an HVCC-compliant, easy-to-use loan ordering and management application. a la mode’s mission-critical products are used by hundreds of thousands of appraisers, agents, inspectors, and lending professionals to complete the nation’s real estate transactions.  The company’s state-of-the-art offices are located in Salt Lake City, Oklahoma City, and Washington, DC.  To learn more, visit www.alamode.com.