Above, Warren B. Boizot III
Today, approximately 76% of all real estate transactions in Colorado are facilitated by REcolorado, according to InfoSparks—as brokers, agents and others in the industry rely on the MLS’s data, technology and intelligence to successfully serve their clients.
REcolorado is also a great fit for appraisers, many of whom have experienced firsthand the value the MLS system offers. This is important to the REcolorado team because they know the better the system functions for appraisers, the smoother the transaction will be for everyone involved.
Warren B. Boizot III, a certified residential appraiser with BLG Appraisal Group, Inc., agrees with that sentiment, noting that working with REcolorado to ensure the MLS system is working for the residential real estate appraisal firm has been a game-changer.
“In 1998, I hated what I was doing, and was trying to make a decision as to what I wanted to do. A friend I played baseball with was an appraiser, and he invited me to come check it out. I rode with him on a day in October, and I loved it. I’m now a workaholic, working 365 days a year,” explains Boizot, who has been engulfed in appraisals for 26 years.
Focusing mostly on the city of Denver—with his niche being downtown condos and high-rises—Boizot has found REcolorado to be nothing short of beneficial, using it to glean information about the properties he’s looking at to keep the transaction running smoothly.
He’s also been attending REcolorado’s Appraiser Committee quarterly meetings for the past seven years, which are both informative and helpful to his day-to-day business.
“There are other committees that aren’t just for appraisers, but have other end-users as well,” says Boizot, who has been the appraiser representative for REcolorado’s Customer Advisory panel the past couple years.
REcolorado uses the feedback from these meetings to modify both its MLS policies and MLS system to require certain parts of the listing that will make the appraiser’s job more streamlined.
“REcolorado supplies different statistics and reports that can be run, which is crucial for appraisers. Our job is to track the market as to where it was in a certain period of time and where it’s potentially going, and specifically on an appraisal, where it is today,” explains Boizot. “The use of different tracking or stats or patterns or graphs or things you can put together in order to customize the data is vital.”
Drilling down further, Boizot goes on to explain that if he’s working on an appraisal and is interested in pricing trends for two-bedroom homes with one bathroom on the main level in any given neighborhood, he can simply run a report to gather information that will help bolster and improve his findings.
“In April 2022, the entire appraisal industry adopted the ANSI standards, a standard of measurement in which appraisers now adhere to, no matter the market,” Boizot says, pointing to a newer feature on REcolorado that deals with square footage. “It’s very important that agents using the MLS system report square footage all the same. Now, all above-grade footage is reported in one field on the listing and all below-grade footage is listed in a separate field.”
While agents typically input square footage data directly from the public record, Boizot notes that an addition to a property could skew that data. Now, as a result of these industry changes and feedback from the appraiser community, REcolorado is actively pursuing a solution.
“I don’t know how an appraiser could do their job without the use of REcolorado,” concludes Boizot. “It’s important for any appraiser because it has information on the agents involved so that we can pick up the phone, text or email.”
For more information, please visit https://recolorado.com.
