Inspectify Welcomes Aloft
Today is a special day along our journey here at Inspectify. I am thrilled to announce that Aloft Appraisals, a leading technology platform for real estate valuations, will be joining our team here at Inspectify. We have had the opportunity to collaborate with the Aloft team over the past few years on multiple unique initiatives, including desktop appraisals and remote broker price opinions (BPOs). I have also had the pleasure of getting to know Travis as we have shared stories and advice as Seattle Proptech founders and CEOs. We have joked in the past that eventually we would join forces, and I am beyond excited for that to become a reality.
A unification of Inspectify and Aloft makes sense on so many fronts, and for my own benefit and our collective teams, I wanted to take the time to articulate those in this blog post. Before I begin, I want to thank both the Inspectify and Aloft teams for all the energy and grit you have brought to our companies. It would be putting it lightly to say it has been a difficult few years for anyone working in real estate, and the fact that we are still here building for a better tomorrow is a testament to your efforts. Now let’s talk about what makes this so special and the additional functionality it brings to our already robust inspection and underwriting platform.
Unified Inspection and Valuation Platform
Over the years, it has become almost a weekly occurrence that we are asked by existing Inspectify clients if we provide appraisals and other valuation services. Similarly, Travis and the Aloft team have been asked about inspection and underwriting services. Both make total sense. If you are an enterprise client with a large book of business, it is easier to manage one vendor across multiple services rather than multiple vendors across a single service. We have already begun to service our combined list of over 300 enterprise brands on anything inspection, underwriting, or valuation-specific.
Additionally, a large area of focus for Inspectify over the past few years has been building a strong enterprise go-to-market strategy, which has allowed us to expand beyond real estate to industries such as property management, construction lending, insurance, and mortgage servicing. Very quickly, we will ramp up our efforts to apply this to industries more specific to Aloft's target customers, who depend on appraisals but do not necessarily have as strong of a need for inspections.
Finally, by integrating our technology platforms together, we can not only offer a one-stop shop for our enterprise brands but also drive unique efficiencies and efficacies that are unmatched in our respective industries. Let me give a few examples of this. For our real estate investor clients, who are already using Inspectify for acquisition inspections, we can repurpose our standardized inspection data set to enable a desktop/hybrid appraisal at a fraction of the price and time that other incumbents would offer. For our insurance clients, who are already using Inspectify for underwriting inspections (post-bind/renewal), by integrating our inspection data into Aloft's Appraiser Toolkit, we can provide a tailored tool to internal carrier appraisers for highly accurate replacement costs. The distribution and integration synergies between the brands are immense, and we cannot wait to get started for our clients, both new and old.
Vertically Integrated Appraisal Software
Over the years, Aloft has developed a highly sophisticated suite of applications to streamline the real estate appraisal workflow. With AloftOS, they have effectively created a "Domino's Pizza Tracker" for appraisal workflow; a tool that has allowed them to improve speed, reduce revisions, and ultimately drive better outcomes for both appraisal management companies and lenders alike. More profoundly, their recently released Appraiser Toolkit is the only software of its kind on the market. By having MLS datafeeds connected directly into the tool, the Toolkit is able to save appraisers a significant amount of time (and monitors 😅) when completing appraisals. The Toolkit is built to support the upcoming Universal Appraisal Dataset (UAD) 3.6 requirements, which will go into effect later this year and fundamentally change appraisal workflows. Finally, through their collaboration with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and developing the curriculum for appraisals for the UAD 3.6 rollout, they are positioned on the cutting edge of how appraisers can stay compliant with this new rollout and leverage the newest and best tools in the industry.
On the Inspectify side, we have spent years building the most advanced inspection software that exists in the market today. Built with data uniformity and standardization in mind, we are able to create integrated quality assurance and control to ensure consistent and reliable results every time. In short order, we plan to integrate our inspection software directly into Aloft's Toolkit software, providing a platform that will allow appraisers to capture data in the field accurately and efficiently (either self-collected or via desktop/hybrid) and then port it directly into their analysis Toolkit seamlessly. Additionally, given that Inspectify completes tens of thousands of inspections every month across the country, over time that proprietary data will start to become available in Toolkit, providing its users with access to unique insights on properties that are unmatched anywhere else.
The final piece of the puzzle is form generation, i.e., form filler. Inspectify has built technology in the past that generates various state and city required forms from our unified data set, a similar technology required for traditional appraisal form fillers. Given the previously mentioned UAD 3.6 release, we see a tremendous opportunity to build a form filler that embraces this new structure and integrates directly into Toolkit and, thus, into Inspectify inspection data. There’s obviously a lot to build here, but we are very excited about the roadmap ahead.
Desktop/Hybrid First Appraisal Platform
Over the past few years, there has been a strong push by both lenders and regulators to move towards desktop and hybrid appraisals. The consensus is straightforward: by allowing qualified individuals to collect property data, appraisal turn times can be improved because appraisers can focus on creating high-quality reports rather than spending time driving from property to property. Unfortunately, in reality, this hasn't always proven to be true. Many of our clients are seeing very little difference in turn times for desktop and hybrid appraisals. The culprit? You may be surprised to hear it is taking up to seven days (****!?) to complete the inspection and up to three days to complete the appraisal.
We see a tremendous opportunity to build an appraisal platform that fully embraces the desktop/hybrid model and provides the best SLAs in the industry. It starts with our inspection platform, which, powered by our 85,000+ inspectors nationwide, can, on average, complete occupied inspections in under 48 hours and vacant inspections in under 30 hours. Additionally, with our upcoming direct integration of our inspection platform into AloftOS and Toolkit, our appraiser panel will be able to quickly review and complete desktop/hybrid assignments in real time.
Journey Ahead
I am thrilled for the journey ahead of us. The combination of Inspectify and Aloft makes sense on so many fronts, and I'm sure more will become evident in the weeks ahead. I'm excited to celebrate this milestone with my teammates, both old and new. To our new Aloft teammates, welcome, and thank you for joining us. To my Inspectify teammates, thank you for all that you have done to get us to this point. I'm excited to continue our journey to unlock the API of real estate.