From Dallas: What I love about our Mobile Workshops

I’m writing today from Dallas at our 17^th Mobile Workshop. I’ve attended a few of these workshops now with our mobile expert team and wanted to share my experience for those of you who haven’t had a chance to attend.

What I love about this workshop is how engaged the attendees are and how much they learn. Don’t get me wrong, the first day always starts with some skepticism. If you’re like many appraisers who’ve been in the business for years, you have a certain workflow and patterns that “just work.” However, as our instructor Joel says, “when are you going to stop doing what works and start doing what works better?”

The class begins with an overview of common paper-based workflow. Many appraisers don’t realize just how much paper they’re generating and working with. In Dallas, the group came up with an average of 72 pieces of paper per report (including MLS printouts, printed e-mail correspondence, field notes, and more). If you work on five reports a week and 50 weeks out of the year, that’s 18,720 pieces of paper (plus the ink and hand cramps that go with it)! It’s not until you start listing it all out that you realize how much you’re producing. Then, you start realizing how inefficient it is not only dealing with all that paper but the method of gathering data this way.

From there, that’s where the workshop gets really good. Our instructors show easy ways for changing to paperless methods, give time for attendees to get hands on with the more than 40 Android™ and iOS devices we bring, go over mobile data gathering and sketching, and talk about cool apps (most of them 100% free) for taking your desk with you in the field. I call these the “ooo” and “ahh” sessions because you hear a lot of that throughout the day. Yes, we cover a lot but another thing we say at the workshop is to start small. It’s all about changing one or two things at a time, which will help you overcome the “moment of inertia” to getting to the right path for a mobile business.

One last aspect I love about the Mobile Workshop is networking! Each class has appraisers attending from all across the country and because of the hands-on sessions, there’s a ton of interaction. I hear a lot of great conversations about workflow, business strategy, and clients.

There’s still room in our final Mobile Workshop of the season next weekend (March 14^th -15^th) in Salt Lake City. Click here to sign up. I know you won’t regret it. We hope to see you there!