With this release, you can now request bids for residential appraisal orders. You can see the release notes here, and there’s an FAQ that will answer a lot of questions, but read on for the highlights.
Reduce assignment times with residential bid requests
We heard from many of you who are dealing with delays in order assignment due to appraiser shortages (among other factors.) We found the delay is caused when sending an order to a single appraiser (who might let it expire) then repeating that process several times until the order is finally accepted.
Our new residential bidding system solves the problem by letting you send an order to several appraisers at once to gauge their availability and interest. It's not a way to blast the order indiscriminately, it's smarter than that because it uses your own Intelligent Selection System (ISS) settings to select a group of appraisers who are most qualified for the job, so you can be sure that you're only requesting bids from appraisers who fit the bill.
If an order requires reassignment, you can request bids for it just like you can a new order, so if a non-bid order unexpectedly gets declined or expires, you’ll be able to speed it up by requesting bids.
Fees and due dates: Locked or unlocked
We know there are a variety of reasons you want to request bids, so we built these tools to be flexible, particularly with the ability to lock or unlock the order fee and due date. If you're dealing with an appraiser shortage, you can unlock the fee and due date to field several appraisers' projections. Or, if you're under a tight deadline, lock the due date and leave the fee unlocked to fulfill your turn time most competitively. No matter how you use it, the advantage is that you're getting responses from these appraisers in parallel, saving tons of time.
You’re in control
Once you enable residential bidding in Vendor Selection Settings, you can globally lock or unlock the fees and due dates, plus set a default bid window. However, each of these can be controlled per order. To streamline order placement, enable Automatic vendor selection so your ISS criteria will be used to select the best-qualified group of appraisers who will receive bid requests. If you'd rather manually select appraisers for bidding, leave Automatic vendor selection disabled. You'll also find new permissions to manage which users may issue bid requests, so you can make sure your team has the right tools for their job.
Several of you have been eagerly awaiting these tools, and our tests have shown a lot of promise, so we can't wait to hear how much this reduces your assignment times. Let us know what you think at info@MercuryVMP.com!