Written by Nathan Thomas on April 20, 2004
Written by Nathan Thomas on April 20, 2004
The Mercury Network, our server hub which routed more than 17.5 million appraisal reports in the last 12 months, and its user interface, Mercury Desktop, are too often confused with one another. One of our competitors formulates and executes entire business plans on the premise of providing an alternative for appraisers who don't want to pay to use the Mercury Network; the Mercury Network is free to use. (Don't tell them.)
Mercury Desktop is a tool that makes using the Mercury Network easier and more efficient. In the coming weeks and months, Mercury Desktop will be renamed and rebranded to better differentiate it from the free Mercury Network. But we're not just dressing it up. It will also grow to become a true collaboration tool, addressing the ad-hoc nature of appraiser-to-appraiser workflow on shared/supervisory projects as well as the mobile and distributed nature of appraisers.
At the same time, Mercury Network will be intentionally shrunk down. Mercury Network's greatest marketing weakness in the appraisal community is its own popularity. Tens of thousands of orders come into Mercury every week, and that continues to grow at a steady pace even as the market activity supposedly levels off. But there are simply too many appraisers per county, and there are too many ways for an appraiser or small management company to add themselves to areas in the directory that they don't really serve, bumping up the number of appraisers per county even further.
We'll be restricting the Mercury Network listings to appraisers who have an Appraiser XSite, to restrict an XSite listing in the Network to a given number of reasonable counties (say, 10 counties), and to direct the orders straight to that appraiser's XSite from within the Mercury interface. That way, Mercury Network itself isn't "in the middle" between you and your client.
Once the client finds you in the list for a county and clicks on your link, they see only your own branding and logo from then on. With the large number of XSites users out there, we'll have full nationwide coverage and yet each county will be small enough that the orders will be more concentrated among the appraisers in that county -- and the ones who get the orders know what to do with them, since they came in from their own XSite. There will still be no charge for a Mercury Network listing.
The revised and renamed Mercury Desktop will then simply be getting orders from and posting status to your own XSite and to and from lenders or AMCs with plugins. However, on the lender side, our upcoming Mortgage XSites, which are already getting great press before even having been released, will generate instant plugins for each lender or broker who owns a Mortgage XSite. So the number of plugins will grow dramatically. They'll be broken down geographically to reduce confusion. And when you get an order from one, the plugin configuration file will come with it so you'll have it instantly.
Appraiser XSites will become more of a central hub product due to their "24 x 7, always on" nature. And, Mercury Desktop, Mercury Network, WinTOTAL, and other products will all tie into an XSite for extra features. They can all work standalone, but having them all is a classic case of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. And with our new Elite program, doing that is easier and cheaper than ever.
More information on these exciting new changes in the coming weeks!