For many appraisers, 2021 was a year of record appraisal assignment volume, and the trend is likely to continue in 2022. But all that business creates a crucial challenge for firms trying to keep up with demand: delivering reports to clients faster without sacrificing quality—or their firms’ reputations.
LightBox’s newly released commercial real estate valuation platform helps appraisers overcome this challenge. An end-to-end solution, Valuation supplants the various tools on which valuation professionals have long relied and dramatically improves their ability to research property and market data, write high-quality reports, and win more assignments. With the ability to effortlessly manage their request-for-proposal (RFP) and job pipeline, appraisers can stay on top of growing demand and better serve their customers.
LightBox Valuation’s property research portal is the only technology solution that includes virtually every research dataset, document, and map that appraisers need for property analysis and report production, all in a single, easy-to-use interface. Appraisers can complete frontend property research in minutes instead of hours, saving a vast amount of time. And as one LightBox customer aptly phrased it, saving time means saving money.
To prove the point, LightBox recently conducted a time study to find out how much faster appraisers can research their properties using LightBox Valuation.
The study covered the collection of data, maps, and documents, as well as the insertion of those elements into appraisal reports. The research elements included site verification, historical ownership and sales, zoning, assessment and tax, site information and flooding, improvements, subject maps (frontage), traffic, demographics, wetlands, seismic, market boundaries, school, crime, and custom maps.
As the chart indicates, researching all these areas without LightBox would take on average about 97 minutes. When using Valuation, that time drops to just over five minutes, a savings of an hour and a half. Using Valuation helped appraisers complete these tasks 17.2 times faster than previously. Furthermore, the process is completely automated, which eliminates the potential for data entry errors.
All in all, the LightBox Valuation platform can help appraisers—from solo shops to large firms—accelerate the production process so they can take on more work without sacrificing the quality upon which they’ve built their names.
