New appraisal tech aims to engage home valuation professionals

Incenter Appraisal Management on Wednesday announced the launch of RemoteVal, a software product that aims to directly involve a human appraiser.

The technology allows the appraiser to remotely access a homeowner’s smartphone camera via video call in order to direct the homeowner to take geotagged and time-stamped photos while also recording area dimensions with a 3-D scanning digital measuring tape. To ensure safety and accuracy, each appraisal comes in as a job order and Incenter shares it directly with the appraiser. The live-streamed video goes directly to Incenter’s servers so they can’t be edited in any way.

“Appraisers told us they didn’t want to get behind [the use of] hybrid products because they’re antithetical to the way they do business,” Mark Walser, president of Incenter Appraisal Management, said in an interview. “[Appraisers] want to see it, they want to touch it. In the end, they're signing their names to these appraisal reports and putting themselves at risk every time they do that.”

After pilot testing RemoteVal, it took appraisers an average of eight minutes to get everything they needed from the homeowner for a 2,500 square foot house, he said. Because of the remote nature, appraisers wouldn’t need to charge drive times and could increase their volume, cutting appraisal turnarounds from weeks down to five or six days, Walser estimated.

Faster turn times and convenience have become increasingly important in the aftermath of natural disasters, when backlogs of damage verification quickly build up. Delays in property assessments hold up needed forbearance claims. Early calculations from CoreLogic showed Hurricane Ida caused $220 billion in reconstruction costs from 941,392 homes. Walser hopes RemoteVal can assist in these inspections.

“Every property is different and so much of the appraiser’s job relies on the conversation with the homeowner, that’s not something that should be overlooked,” Walser said. “You can’t get real-time questions about property remediation or flooding for example if someone’s just feeding you photos.”

The software is released at a time when appraisers are increasingly an endangered breed, as new entrants to the field are few and technological advancements reduce the human role in the process. The social distancing rules spurred by the pandemic only accelerated that further. In the past 18 months, companies like Black Knight, Cape Analytics, Reggora and Truepic, released products that streamline appraisals through automation and by allowing homeowners to upload their own pictures and videos. While many of these products still involve appraisers, they are relegated as backstops instead of active participants in the proceedings.

Nationwide, the total number of appraisers has fallen each of the past few years, declining to 75,100 in 2019 from 87,130 in 2014, according to the Appraisal Institute and the U.S. Census Bureau. Walser estimates that between 70,000 and 73,000 appraisers are working in 2021. Also, the average appraiser is 61 years old, so the sector could see a wave of retirements in the near future, he said.

Those waning numbers contribute to the rising costs and increasing bottleneck of home valuations in a white hot real estate market.

“Appraisals are in super high demand and we have too few appraisers out there,” said Sammy Iliopoulos, senior loan officer at Guaranteed Rate. “Your typical turn time in Boston was two to three weeks, now they’re becoming a lot higher, more expensive and delayed.”