Newly launched platform gives appraisal power to lenders

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In a prepared statement, EVP’s founder and CEO Drew Watson recalled some of the inspiration behind Inhabet’s creation: “When appraisal management companies first emerged after the financial crisis, I saw an opportunity to transform appraisals for appraisers, banks, credit unions and portfolio lenders with a product that did not require an appraiser’s inspection,” he said. “With the unveiling of the Inhabet platform, we have made it possible for a lender’s trained staff to complete an estimate of value themselves.”

While much of EVP’s business is for residential valuations – including automated valuation models (AVM) and hybrid models – Inhabet also empowers CRE valuations, enabling banks to standardize data so it can be more easily analyzed. Noting the high cost of CRE appraisals, company officials say CRE investors stand to benefit greatly from the platform, particularly since the commercial real estate industry previously had no standardized data.

To be sure, there are other real estate valuation data providers out there. EVP officials, however, point to the uniqueness of Inhabet given that it is a valuation system with multiple data sources and the only platform that enables a lender’s staff to prepare valuation reports on their own, using a process and a set of standards that is consistent across their entire product line.

Like many inventions, Inhabet emerged from some measure of necessity: “We came to a point where we could not handle all the orders that were coming our way,” Rasmussen said. “So, we developed Inhabet to empower lenders to use our data and process to create an estimate of value on their own. Compared to obtaining an appraised value or a hybrid appraisal from an appraiser, there is no faster, more cost-effective valuation solution than Inhabet.”