Goodbye Mercury, hello XSites Network

In our last now biweekly edition we told you how and why we were providing Mercury Desktop users with free upgrades to XSite Order Manager, and additionally, Standard XSites (functional primarily for branding and order management) to the more than 6,000 Mercury Desktop users who did not have an XSite. We alluded to an overall effort to phase out the Mercury brand in favor of the more individualized, personally branded XSites Network.

The Mercury Network was borne of the market changing idea that appraisers and their clients could find and do business with one another electronically for free. It was launched at a time when proprietary EDI systems were debuting or in the planning stages that sought to charge appraisers for the marketing advantages, ease of use and efficiency of EDI networks. It worked.

In fact, it worked so well that ours became the only network anywhere in the entire real estate sphere with the ability to maintain the branding of the participants while still providing backend ordering and collaboration tools. It grew to the point where it was better for our customers to allow their private branding and marketing to emerge from "underneath" what after all is called the "back end" for a reason. And with a growing population of other service providers and clients of your services sharing the same collaboration tools, it was a natural evolution to include them as well.

Today users of XSites number in the tens of thousands, and even before we produced some 6,000 more, appraisers made up the majority of all XSites owned. But we have many thousands of Agent XSites users, Inspector XSites users and now, Mortgage XSites users – your (direct) clients, small- to medium-sized brokers or loan officers responsible for ordering appraisals.

The rapidly growing XSites Network will now allow all of those professionals to collaborate on many documents and processes including but beyond appraisals throughout the listing-to-closing real estate cycle. The XSites Network will tighten the relationships lenders and their representatives have with their vendors, like you. Taking advantage of instant status updates, instant data retrieval and status messaging from the field, contact and schedule management and secure report delivery, small- to medium-size lenders, individual agents, inspectors and appraisers will all have the technology at their disposal that only their bigger competitors could afford until now.

Each XSite retains its own domain name and look and feel, yet the web services-based transaction management tools operating behind the scenes – formerly called the Mercury Network – provide the consistency and open-standards integration previously found only in monolithic, third party networks. As a result, the XSites Network allows our customers to provide services feasible previously only for larger companies, without losing the hard-won public brand identity often associated with linking to third-party network solutions.

In the future, we plan to offer credit, title, flood and other settlement services on the XSites Network, but that's getting ahead of things a little. Right now it's important to note that all of the benefits of the Mercury Network are retained for you in the new XSites Network, the disadvantages of ceding individual brand identity to a perceived monolithic Network are removed, and collaboration is increasingly possible with a number of players in the home selling, buying and mortgage processes.

We'll provide in this space as well as in our other customer communications in the near future with examples of how you can maximize your return on investment in your XSite under the new XSites Network.