Property Presentation Wizard a hit with FSBOs — and maybe lender clients, too

Appraisers are going to want and need to market their services beyond standard lender clients, to customers like FSBOs – especially as interest rates continue to rise. A new integration between WinTOTAL and your Enterprise level XSite is one way to expand your market.

Our thrust recently has been to seamlessly integrate your XSite with WinTOTAL, both the Athena version you're using now and the new Aurora generation, due out this winter. Among the most popular and interesting integrations we've been able to program and put out is our Property Presentation Wizard. Enterprise level XSite owners can take advantage of this feature to market their services to owners selling their homes themselves – FSBOs.

We've been saying that your XSite is the "hub" of your business, and this is a prime example. It's more than just storing data and contacts – with this feature, the XSite is processing information and creating custom content on the site for you, based on something that you've done in WinTOTAL. It's a value added that sets you apart from your competition – appraiser, AVM or otherwise. This is how it works:

You sell your services to a FSBO client – so that the FSBO can show his potential homebuyers that his asking price is valid ("Don't believe me? here's what it appraised for").

You conduct a standard appraisal and create a standard URAR report in WinTOTAL. From there, you run the "Property Presentation Wizard" that asks the questions needed to create an online property presentation such as you might find on the best real estate agent websites (like our Agent XSites).

Once the wizard is complete, the FSBO client receives an e-mail from you, stating that an online summary of the appraisal report is ready for his approval, and provides a link to view the online report summary. The FSBO checks the online summary, and clicks an approval link to publish. By doing so, he clicks through an End User License Agreement (EULA) that states that he/she grants permission for the information to be made public (which is required by USPAP).

Finally, the summary is "published" to your XSite. The FSBO can give the URL to anybody he/she desires, so they can see the summary. This summary looks just what you might see on one of our Agent XSites, except it's just a summary of the property as compiled from your appraisal report in WinTOTAL, instead of from an MLS listing. The URL isn't available via the home page of the site; it's a private address that only the homeowner can distribute.

Want to see a sample? (Sure you do!) Click here.

What's even cooler is that we've heard from some appraisers that this feature is not just beneficial to FSBOs. Lender clients have also stated that they would use the feature. Possibly for REOs, but just as likely FSBOs who come to a mortgage broker first for help with buying the new home or a bridge loan.

It's really a new case of integration of XSites and WinTOTAL, where both products are needed in order for the feature to work and get the full benefit. And we'll be doing a lot more of things like this in the future.