PropMix Newsletter – July 2024

A Note from the CEO

Hope you are having a great summer and finding ways to stay cool in this unrelenting heat wave.Would like to take a couple of minutes to provide you with a mid-year update on our first-half accomplishments and what’s coming soon in the second half.

As I mentioned in my January update, continuing on our investment in product development in 2023 we have successfully released many new features in our product platforms based on customer demand. You will see the headlines in the following pages.

Our AI Innovation Center has helped take ValueTest.ai to market in a record 4 months from concept to product. It has also helped embed numerous generative AI and deep learning capabilities into our core product suites – Profet and Prospektr.

Profet Valuation NextGen is now beta testing – this is our overhauled platform that incorporates generative AI and also supports the new UAD standards. We are targeting to have the new UAD reports and MISMO 3.6 support by the 4th quarter of this year and be well prepared for the GSE migration calendar.

Prospektr – our real estate agent/broker platform, has adapted to the new changes resulting from the NAR settlement. We now support sell-side capabilities that allow a homeowner to initiate the listing process online with a broker.

Lenders can now easily partner with a broker to create co-branded experiences for home value, net equity, and financing updates that drive home listing and buying opportunities.

Looking forward to the rest of 2024 as we continue to grow our product capabilities and help our customers achieve higher productivity and lower cost.

Thank you and please reach out to me anytime to know more about the topics in this newsletter.

Sincerely

Umesh Harigopal
CEO, PropMix

Review Gets a Boost with Powerful NLP Engine

We’re excited to announce the introduction of Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Profet Review for appraisal reviews. This new capability enhances the way the application reads and interprets all comments in an appraisal including the addendum text, allowing for sophisticated extraction and contextual understanding of information.

Key Features:

Contextual Association: The NLP engine efficiently associates comments to subject property and comparable characteristic, condition, and quality information..
Data Verification: It cross-verifies information in the comments with the data captured in the structured part of the form for subject & comparables. If discrepancies are detected, the engine alerts the appraiser to ensure data accuracy and consistency.
Addendum Review: Wherever the form reads “See addendum” or a similar reference to the addendum, the NLP engine checks the addendum text to associate the appropriate comments and validate them.
The engine now also scrutinizes various aspects such as property condition, neighborhood description, sales comparison, and prior sale comments, providing a comprehensive review of all pertinent details.

Integration with Rules Engine: The NLP engine is integrated with the rules engine and all the information extracted via natural language processing becomes another information source to be incorporated into the rule. As a result, we can now author new rules with references to information extracted via NLP. This is a powerful capability to enable new custom NLP rules to be added with a quick turnaround time.

These enhancements aim to deliver a comprehensive automated review process that reduces manual errors and improves the overall productivity for appraisal reviews.

Valuation – NextGen Platform in Beta

Our flagship product – Profet Valuation (formerly known as Market Conditions Advisor – MCA) has been undergoing a major overhaul and facelift for the following primary reasons:

An improved user experience and productivity enhancing features for appraisers
Introduce generative AI capabilities into the platform to assist the appraiser
Foundation capabilities to support the new UAD standards

Profet Valuation NextGen has now entered beta testing phase and will be ready for customer migrations in early August 2024.

The PropMix operations team will work closely with each customer to help with the migration. All the previous orders from the current Profet Valuation platform will be maintained as-is post migration and will be accessible without any interruption.

The NextGen platform is part of a comprehensive suite of products under the Profet brand with seamless and deep integration across the products:

Profet Orders: An order management system with customizable workflow, panel management, reporting, auto-assignment, and much more.
Profet Review: The fast-growing appraisal review system that automates quality control with NLP, Image Analysis, Floor plan analysis, and a customizable rule library.
Profet Portal: The system that pulls together all the products to enable a single point to manage the platform and view business-wide dashboards.

Introduces Social Logins

Unearth New Investment Opportunities with the Opportunity Scanner

Prospektr now supports numerous social login options to ease the customer sign up process. Social logins using Apple, Google, or Facebook have numerous benefits:

Decreases the friction at the time a buyer or seller needs to sign up for a service
Improves lead capture: Email addresses or phone numbers obtained from the social login sources such as Google or Apple is pre-verified
Increases our options to engage the customer via additional social channels

In addition, the customer also benefits from eliminating additional usernames and passwords to remember.

PropMix is proud to partner with an investment real estate broker to develop the first of a kind investment bot that can scan the market for investment opportunities that can fit various different investment strategies such as: Flipping, Buy-Build New-Sell, or Buy-Hold-Rent, etc.

This innovative scanner auto-computes the ROI for each new listing in the market based on multiple investment strategies and recommends the best opportunities to pursue further.

The best part is that the strategies can be easily tweaked to fit your cost models, ROI thresholds and so on.

IDX Search Presets for Buyer Engagement

Prospektr also introduced the concept of preset searches to simplify finding properties for sale. For example, preset searches such as “Foreclosures”, “Affordable Homes”, or “Investment Properties” can filter the properties based on predefined criteria in each market.

These preset searches can be modified for each market and for each broker based on their specific business goals. Recently, one of the brokers from Florida wanted to showcase “Golf Communities” and “Gated Senior Communities” because a large part of their clientele has such interests.

One more way to utilize such preset searches is from targeted landing pages for Foreclosures, Affordable Homes, etc. Driving traffic from search engines or social media sites to such landing pages usually drops the journey in the next step from the landing page to the IDX search. The preset search capability now can be integrated to retain the context from the landing pages into the IDX search – which in turn increases the relevance of the results and a better lead capture rate.

ValueTest.ai goes to market in 4 months using the Prospektr Platform

ValueTest.ai is a ground-breaking concept founded by a veteran appraiser – Brent Jones, CEO of R3 Appraisal Management, to help agents and brokers have more effective conversations with their customers supported by appraiser-grade market research. ValueTest’s market research serves as an alternative to Zillow or Redfin home values and in addition can also support downstream transaction stages – appraisal, appraisal quality control, and underwriting.

ValueTest is completely powered by the Prospektr platform which in turn leverages all the machine learning and AI models from PropMix’s property intelligence engines. ValueTest specific user experiences and workflows were implemented within the Prospektr platform. As a result, ValueTest was launched into the market within 4 months starting from concept to a working production system for clients.

Appraisal Digitization now handles custom valuation documents

PropMix Appraisal Digitization has traditionally been used by our customers to convert standard appraisal PDF forms such as 1004 (Single Family), 1073 (Condominiums), 1025 (Multi-Family), and 1007 (Rent Schedules) into MISMO XMLs. The engine combines OCR, deep learning, and image processing to convert any PDF – both first generation parseable PDFs and 2nd or higher generation scanned PDFs to MISMO XML.

Appraisal Digitization has now been upgraded to process any valuation document without any limitation to a standard format and produce a MISMO XML for it. So, if you have any alternate valuation PDFs such as Broker Price Opinions (BPOs), AVM reports, Desktop Appraisals, or Evaluations we can now automatically process them to understand the contents to extract subject property data, comparable information, sales grid, property history, prior sales, reconciliation, and comments to produce a MISMO XML.

This powerful capability creates new opportunities in the Profet Review platform where our customers can now automate their quality control for any valuation product.Appraisal Digitization has been able to achieve this major next step by leveraging new AI techniques such as image understanding and the information extraction capabilities of Open AI.

Data & API Enhancements

Zoning for Listings: Listing Details APIs now automatically fetch zoning information where available from county / city resources. Currently county zoning data is available for the Chicago metro and a few suburbs. Additional markets will continue to be covered. Note that the public record data APIs from PropMix already contain the zoning information.

Spelling mistakes in Street Names: Improved address matching now considers street names with spelling mistakes up to 2 characters using Levenshtein distance algorithm and an extensive dictionary.
Agent Master: Established a master data set for agents by normalizing agent rosters from all the MLSs to uniquely identify all agents. APIs are now available to search for across the country and then find listings and historical transaction information for any agent.

Census Data APIs: Socioeconomic APIs have been upgraded to provide population, employment, and income statistics for any Census Tract in the country. Associated with property information, these APIs support business use cases where applications need to compare neighborhoods.

New Insights Launched

Neighborhood Scores
Various neighborhood scores have been delivered to indicate age mix, racial mix, land use mix, etc. for any census tract. For example, the land use mix score helps understand if a neighborhood is predominantly residential or commercial. Such indicators are valuable in researching property value impacts.
Busy Place Scores
The Busy Place Score for a property is a measure of how busy the area around the property may be. It is calculated by measuring the distance of the property from nearby highways and arterial roadways. Property values are influenced by how busy a location may be

Valuation Expo 2024

Join us at Valuation Expo 2024, taking place August 19th-21st at the iconic Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.Dive into three days of immersive learning, valuable networking, and endless possibilities.

Valuation Expo 2024 – Registration will open in February.Date – August 19th-21st.Venue – Caesars Palace , Las Vegas Blvd, Paradise,United States

Umesh Harigopal, CEO of PropMix, and Danny Mancino, EVP – Sales & Data Solutions , will be attending to showcase our industry-leading products, including:

Profet Valuation Platform
Profet Review: Rules, Comps, Bias, & Image Recognition

We understand the needs of top AMCs and lenders, and customize our offerings to deliver maximum value.

Interested in a Meeting?

If you have 20 minutes for a personalized discussion about PropMix solutions, please let us know your availability, and we’ll find a time slot that works for Umesh or Danny.