Reggora recently announced that its order management platform can embed the borrower’s appraisal experience into a lender’s custom point of sale system (POS). This will improve the borrower’s experience by resolving some of the most common issues that arise during the appraisal, which includes paying for the appraisal, scheduling the inspection, seeing the status, and more, Reggora said in a release.

Through the use of Reggora’s open API, lenders can bring all of these improvements directly into their proprietary POS.

“The appraisal is an important part of securing a mortgage loan, and seamlessly connecting every part of the borrower’s experience is essential,” Jim Black, 20-year mortgage origination veteran, former strategic advisor at InstaMortgage, and executive director of lender strategy at Calque, Inc., said in the release. “If the borrower is informed and comfortable throughout every step of the process, it will improve their customer satisfaction. The mortgage process can be stressful, but lenders who use digital tools to ensure appraisers, borrowers, and all stakeholders are on the same page can help alleviate some of that stress.”

The integration from Reggora doesn’t just improve the origination process for borrowers; it solves a number of longstanding challenges for mortgage lenders as well, the company said. According to STRATMOR Group’s 2022 Appraisal Performance Study, it takes an average of 3.68 calendar days for borrowers to schedule their property inspection with an appraiser. The time is spent going back and forth via emails, texts, and phone calls. By allowing the borrower to simply select an open time slot on the appraiser’s calendar inside the POS, lenders are able to shorten that time by as much as two calendar days.

As to borrower fallout, higher interest rates have resulted in lenders competing for a smaller group of borrowers, Reggora noted in the release. Traditional payment collection methods, like phone calls from a processor or a link from an AMC, can take days to complete. By making it simple for borrowers to pay for the appraisal upfront, in the same system they completed the application, lenders are able to collect payment within four hours and take that borrower off the market much faster.

Regarding lost revenue from appraisal fees, Reggora said that by collecting payment up front, lenders also are able to eliminate the revenue leakage from appraisal fees. In transactions where the deal falls through, or the borrower walks away, lenders are no longer stuck paying for the appraisal directly.

“The appraisal is a critical part of the loan process, but, despite all the progress towards a digital mortgage, the appraisal is still done entirely offline,” Reggora co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Will Denslow said. “There’s a tremendous opportunity for lenders to differentiate by fixing the appraisal experience, and this integration makes it simple for them to do that.”