VEROS is known for its excellence in automated valuation models (AVMs), with this predictive technology offering forming the basis of the company in its early years and quickly cementing the company's foothold in mortgage valuations. But in the last six years, Veros has registered on the industry map in a tremendous way and the innovation just keeps coming.
At the turn of the market, while other valuation technology companies were struggling to keep the doors open, Veros had diversified its focus to include the development of valuation management software services, as well as two landmark industry innovations.
The first innovation came in 2009-2010 with the launch of the GSE's Uniform Collateral Data Portal (UCDP). Working with Veros, Fannie and Freddie standardized appraisal language through the creation of the Uniform Appraisal Dataset (UAD) and then commissioned Veros to build and maintain the UCDP.
Under the direction of the GSEs, this appraisal data delivery portal was able to leverage Veros’ sound approach to transparent valuation data delivery and bring to the industry a method by which the GSEs could accept and validate the new appraisal standard. More than 21 million appraisals have now gone through the UCDP, and the result has been a dramatic increase in the quality of appraisals, and ultimately, in the resulting loans purchased by the GSEs.
As UCDP was adopted by the industry, a number of lenders and technology firms began to utilize Veros’ system-to-system connection and quality control tool known as PATHWAY. These lenders, correspondent lenders, AMCs and technology providers began to quickly realize the advantage of PATHWAY’s benefits, including:
- Access for portal submission with minimal technology integration
- Ability to "preview" for UAD compliance and UCDP "hard stops" and resolve errors prior to submission
- Streamlining the receipt of portal submission results
- Confidence in having integrations and customer support backed by Veros' expert, in-house teams
Now, Veros is working with the Federal Housing Administration to roll out their proprietary appraisal submission portal known as the Electronic Appraisal Delivery (EAD) portal. Veros was first to announce the ability to provide a direct connection to this portal through their PATHWAY integration and now provides users the efficiency of appraisal data delivery to the top three secondary market participants.
“PATHWAY offers a flexible alternative for lenders or technology vendors with volumes too large for manual upload to the UCDP and EAD web interfaces, but too small for an enterprise solution or direct integration,” said David Rasmussen, VP of operations for Veros.
“PATHWAY provides a seamless method to deliver electronic appraisals, with useful quality control mechanisms built-in which then drive better valuation management practices throughout the industry.”
Veros offers more than a dozen property valuation tools and systems, each demonstrating the company’s commitment to providing accurate, flexible options that let customers reduce their risk while meeting compliance requirements.
The company’s VeroSCORE appraisal scoring tool, for example, applies leading data and analytic approaches to check the completeness, compliance, credibility and complexity of an appraisal and provide an advanced look at the expected UCDP and UAD warning messages or hard stops the appraisal will trigger. By giving lenders an automated, almost instant evaluation of an appraisal report, lenders can take necessary actions to correct or validate the appraisals, and ensure a smoothly flowing pipeline from origination to secondary-market purchase.
Veros has been repeatedly recognized with industry awards for its pursuit of data integrity, quality control and transparency through its tools and platforms. In recent years, this recognition has largely circled around the value the company’s efforts toward UAD, UCDP, EAD, VeroSCORE and PATHWAY have brought to the mortgage community. These offerings continue to evolve hand-in-hand with operational- and compliance-driven needs of its customers and appear to only be the beginning for Veros’ innovative team.
“The introduction of data transparency to the appraisal portion of the loan package is just the beginning, one that has much broader implications for all facets of the loan package,” Rasmussen said. “We remain active in the continued evolution of valuation accuracy and data transparency across the entire mortgage market, an effort we believe is critical to the complete return of the housing market and economic stability.”
