Clear Capital has introduced ClearLabs, an in-house innovation lab set out to solve the real estate and mortgage industry’s most pressing challenges. Through ClearLabs, the Clear Capital team can research, test, and launch new solutions designed to advance the real estate and mortgage industries, the company announced in a release.
Jeff Allen, who has served as executive vice president of valuation strategy at Clear Capital since 2017, will advance to lead ClearLabs as executive vice president of innovation labs.
In recent years, and especially with the arrival of COVID-19, there has been an acceleration of change that creates the opportunity to deploy new approaches and technologies. In the past 12 months, Clear Capital has launched a nationwide Modern Appraisal solution that leverages mobile technology and non-appraisers in the property data collection process, as well as OwnerInsight, a free, consumer-friendly mobile tool that enables safe social distancing in the appraisal process by empowering homeowners to provide high-quality information and images of their homes without having an appraiser on-site.
The swift and secure deployment of new solutions like Modern Appraisal and OwnerInsight is what Clear Capital expects to see more of as a result of ClearLabs, the company stated.
“Everyone wins through innovation, especially consumers,” Allen said in the release. “With ClearLabs, our goal is to lean even deeper into innovation in a more accelerated way through focused research, testing and development.”
Clear Capital also stressed that aside from the immediate need to modernize the appraisal process, there are additional needs in the real estate and mortgage industry that ClearLabs aims to address.
Clear Capital envisions a future with same-day property approval on new loans and a seamless process from the initial real estate transaction all the way through to secondary market decisions. Reaching that future will take a series of innovations from the entire industry, and Clear Capital intends to help.
“We want to get our ideas off the whiteboard and into real-world evaluation as quickly as possible,” Clear Capital CEO Duane Andrews said. “With ClearLabs, we can focus on accelerating that process to benefit our customers, and ultimately the consumers we all serve.”
Clear Capital is a real estate valuation and analytics fintech leader.