The Collateral Vision is the name of Oxford, Miss.-based FNC’s new blog, which promises to offer “musings about the mortgage industry” but will likely focus on collateral valuation issues, an area the company has demonstrated a particular expertise in over the years. The company should have plenty to talk about. It’s technology is widely used to help lenders and property valuation providers manage collateral valuation work and it’s led by Bill Rayburn, a leading industry speaker and thought leader who has never backed away from a hot issue.
This is excellent timing for a new blog in the space. This year saw the Home Valuation Code of Conduct shake up the business and the reverberations are still working their way through the industry. Next year promises to be another difficult year for appraisers as they work to remain competitive, while being pushed further from the loan originators who rely on their work. Appraisal Management Companies are hot to take up the slack, but contention between AMCs and appraisers is causing sparks.
It appears that FNC will be entering the fray. In an early post, Robert Dorsey, Chief Data and Analytics Officer and co-founder of the company, writes that the company is hearing from mortgage originators that they are receiving appraisals from appraisers who are operating outside their regions of competence.
“The downturn in the housing market has caused a major disruption in the appraisal process. New regulations and downsizing by the lenders has resulted in many lenders using larger appraisal firms or vendor management companies and relying on them to send the best appraiser to the property. This is not always happening. Appraisers are being assigned to properties without regard to their knowledge of the neighborhood, and the result is that values are being returned that don’t accurately reflect the market value of the property.”
This is troubling, if what FNC is hearing on the street is actually happening. But a press release issued earlier this month by the Title/Appraisal Vendor Management Association raises some doubt.
“The typical driving distance traveled by independent appraisers, retained by the nation’s largest appraisal management companies (AMCs), averages 13 miles in urban and suburban areas this year, according to a new survey conducted by the Title Appraisal Vendor Management Association (TAVMA).”
It seems realistic to assume that if the appraiser is only driving 13 miles from a central location, there is a good chance they should be competent to handle the work.
TAVMA’s information relates only to appraisers hired by AMCs and it is possible that lenders who don’t work with AMCs, now grappling with a job that was formerly handled for them by mortgage brokers, are having trouble getting their orders routed to the right appraisers. FNC says its technology can solve the problem by using geocoding to track properties appraisers that use its system have worked on in the past, creating a method that lenders can use to assign work closer to the appraiser’s area of expertise.
We expect more of these problems to crop up next year and have already subscribed to FNC’s new blog to help us track this part of the industry.
Disclosure: RGA offers communications support to TAVMA and its executive director, Jeff Schurman. The organization retains another agency to handle certain public relations duties, including the press release referenced in this blog post.
Every good manager knows that measurement is critical to ensuring good results. The difference between good managers and great ones is what they measure. When it comes to marketing and public relations, there have been plenty of metrics used over the years. Now that New Media tools are maturing, the debate is raging about what should be measured and how these efforts should be judged.
In general, the leaders in social media have done a good job of trying to work though this. There are good articles here, here and here. But ulimately, I think it’s a lot simpler than all of this.
There is only one way to measure the efforts put into any department in a company: the ultimate impact on sales. Anything that doesn’t allow the company to do a better job of delivering its value to the marketplace, which can only be measured by sales volumn, should be discontinued. That includes marketing and public relations efforts.
There are those who, like Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, will shift metrics when the numbers don’t work out in their favor, but ulimately they will fail if they pretend that their inability to be productive is acceptable to any degree. Any agency that offers a complicated forumula to help you gauge the results of their efforts should be shown to the door. If they cannot show you how what they do will increase your sales, you are better off not spending the money.
We’re very fortunate here. While we consult with some great companies on their PR efforts, we also write for some of the top industry trade publications, not as independent experts but as journalists. This keeps us connected to our roots, ensures that we never stop thinking like the editors we serve and makes us better at helping our clients come up with story pitches that will work for the industry’s best editors. It’s also an exercise in remaining objective.
When you love your clients and you genuinely admire the efforts they put into their product development and marketing, you naturally want to help them spread the word. But stories that are all spin, that are written based on conclusions worked out in advance without consideration for the facts will not serve the long-term best interests of the client.
To their credit, our customers don’t complain when we ask them why. Why did you develop your products this way? Why does it meet the market’s need? Why are you selling it this way? Why are you better than your competition? These are the same questions we ask experts from companies that are not our clients when we write about them for industry publications. We need the answers to create meaningful stories that will ring true with readers, because they are true.
These thoughts come to mind as I read a story in the New York Times about “hundreds of private e-mail messages and documents hacked from a computer server at a British university are causing a stir among global warming skeptics, who say they show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change.”
According to NYT:
“Some of the correspondence portrays the scientists as feeling under siege by the skeptics’ camp and worried that any stray comment or data glitch could be turned against them.”
How sad. In college, I worked side-by-side with physicists working on what was then the largest cloud chamber in the world. They faced many challenges as they worked to control the temperature and humidity of every square centimeter of a 3-foot diameter aluminum column that rose up three stories from the basement of the Physics Building. They hoped to create clouds in a very controlled environment, mostly so we could pollute them and see what happened.
Many of the things they tried didn’t work. There were plenty of skeptics saying they would never get it done. Even so, they continued their work steadfastly, competing against themselves and using the data to tell them how close they were coming to their goal. They never attempted to trick the data they were getting into defeating their skeptics. What real scientist would do this?
Global Warming is a politically charged issue that could have a very real impact on our future survival. We need to find out what’s going on and what part we play, if any, in the changes we’re observing in our environment. It’s not a contest to be won by a particular political party or scientific camp. It requires scientific objectivity, not allegiance to a foregone conclusion that may have nothing to do with the truth.
Being objective can be one of the hardest things a business manager–especially a marketing manager–is asked to do. We ask our clients to do it every day and we make sure we don’t let them down by drinking the Kool-Aide before we know what the facts are. That’s how we ensure that our advice always adds value.
Would we be able to do this if we didn’t work with the industry’s best companies? Probably not. Like I said, we’re fortunate.
We’re seeing and hearing some great comments about the recent Distressed Servicing 2009 Conference that was developed and presented by EuroCatalyst and our friends at Housing Wire. No one from RGA attended the event, but then only about 300 people in the industry were invited, among them, some people who really understand that part of the business.
At least that’s the message we got from this recent post on Agent Genius. Brandie Young writes:
The organizers brought together C-Level (COB, CEO, COO, etc), high-level executives from across the servicing value chain (and around the globe), economists, GSEs and others for a series of peer-to-peer, brutally candid conversations lasting two days. The concept was to foster open, candid sharing and panelists were asked (and answered) challenging questions.
We’re very happy to hear that the show was a big success. We’re starting to get used to the fact that everything Paul Jackson is involved with turns to gold.
To be fair, DS2009 wasn’t the first conference industry built around a critical issue that attempted to really open up a dialog among all interested parties and add value to the conversation. We were involved in the Veros Predictive Methods Conference for a number of years and were very impressed at how the company overcame barriers between competitors to get analysts, risk managers and executives into sessions where they could work through real industry problems together.
In the end, Brandie at Agent Genius is right, it comes back to the content you deliver. But I don’t see how that has anything to do with whether you make a profit or not. Being cheap doesn’t necessarily guarantee a higher value.
That said, I do feel that trade organizations have a responsibility to offer more in the way of training and thought leadership to their members. Offering killer events, whether live or virtual, is one great way to do that.
JIM THORPE, PA (November 20, 2009)—Rick Grant & Associates (RGA), a public relations and marketing communications firm that specializes in social media and corporate storytelling, announced that Rick Grant will be speaking to the Black Diamond Writers Group in Tamaqua during its November meeting. The meeting is being held jointly with the Northeast Pennsylvania Women’s Press Association. Rick will speak about blogging, Twitter, LinkedIn.com and other New Media tools for writers.
“New Media is all about building an audience online, which makes these tools perfect for writers,” said Rick Grant, principal with RGA. “I plan to introduce these folks to blogging, if they are not already there, and talk about how Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and other Social Media sites can help them draw traffic back to what they write.”
Grant has been a writer and journalist for over 25 years. Prior to launching RGA, he founded Texell Interactive Media, a production company delivering electronic audio and video content for Web-based marketing. Before that, he spent more than a decade as one of the nation’s leading financial industry-focused journalists. He writes features for Mortgage Banking magazine and is a columnist for HousingWire magazine and Scotsman Guide. He is also a correspondent for the Times News, Lehighton, Pennsylvnia.
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