DATAGIS
Leveraging GIS for Faster and Accurate Mortgage Generation

The appraisal process of a real estate asset is paramount as it assists financial institutions and their customers in understanding a property’s value. Over the years, as the real estate market continued to boom, appraisers across the world turned to tech-driven solutions to enhance their appraisals’ efficiency and speed. However, due to a significant gap between appraisers and the number of real estate assets that require a valuation, even the most sophisticated appraisers experience delays and backlogs in their operations. This gap is particularly pronounced in the Latin American (LATAM) market, where 12,000 appraiser firms handle close to 1.5 million properties, driving costs and delays in final loan generation. Simultaneously, the lack of standardized processes in the LATAM real estate market is also increasing risks for banks and other financial entities with respect to determining the actual value of a property and generating accurate mortgage amounts.

A business with over six decades of appraisal experience in LATAM—Costa Rica-based DATAGIS offers its state-of-the-art, GIS-powered ERP solution to connect appraisers, financial institutions, and final clients. Following is a conversation that CIO Applications had with DATAGIS’ CEO Alfredo Acedo, on how his company, as a trusted ESRI partner, offers tools and services to help its clients perform appraisals, generate reports, and generate mortgage loans in a quick, efficient, and affordable manner.

Can you give us an overview of DATAGIS?

As an organization, DATAGIS was founded when stakeholders recognized the value of offering a unified ERP solution that creates a shared ecosystem for financial institutions and appraiser firms to collaborate and communicate. And a big part of our success is the partnership with GIS mapping giant—ESRI, which allows us to generate geo-references for every property and integrates the information across all stakeholders to speed up the mortgage generation processes.

With ESRI’s ecosystem, we allow appraisers to perform seamless GIS mapping and spatial analytics and share the gathered intel directly to the bank. Alternatively, our DATAGIS ERP enables financial institutions de-clutter their mortgage generation process by offering workflows that are designed to simplify the process of extracting actionable insights from the extensive datasets they receive from appraisers, contractors, and other related stakeholders. As part of our solution, we also offer business intelligence (BI) on the current real estate and appraisal arenas to help them eliminate risks with respect to pricing, credit formulization, reporting, and more.

Please walk us through DATAGIS’s ESRI-based ERP solution and the benefits it offers.

Our DATAGIS ERP connects banks, borrowers, appraisers, and developers at the same time and in the same workflow using the precision of GIS tech and business intelligence nourished by big data. For appraisers, the solution simplifies the management of cumbersome processes, eliminates repetitive tasks, and creates a database for future reference. On the other hand, DATAGIS eliminates risks by transforming appraisal into a reliable and transparent process based on real-time geospatial and market data updates. We provide a total virtual experience for banks, reducing their operational cost with respect to internal appraisers or quality assurance and enhancing the accuracy in value. At the end of the day, we control the risks related to the mortgage. Lastly, from a developer standpoint, the solution resolves workflow inefficiencies to drive seamless and timely financing of their real estate project.

What is the go-to-market strategy adopted by DATAGIS?

We take two approaches to the go-to-market, one with a financial institution and the other with the appraisers. Owing to our offering’s SaaS nature, we can offer a customizable toolbox to appraisers, alongside special services like connecting the developer plans with pricing plans. Alternatively, for the financial institutions, we provide services like risk and value mapping, visualization of BI trends, and others that add value to their overall mortgage loan generation processes.

With such competencies, DATAGIS has ignited several client success stories where we have successfully reduced the time for appraisals by half, which makes us cost-competitive and allows us to report to banks quickly, minimize additional costs, and eliminate delays. Valor Inmueble is one of the successful clients with more than 50.000 transactions processed through DATA GIS ERP.

Can you elaborate on how DATAGIS adapted to the impact of COVID-19?

Before the pandemic, appraisers had to go to properties, make inspections, take notes, and perform the fieldwork before reporting the relevant financial institution’s details. With our design tools, appraisers gained the ability to perform digital inspections and communicate with property owners to collect information on the property, thereby driving safer, quicker, and more accurate appraisal and final mortgage generation.

The pandemic gave us a chance to visualize our existing and future operations as a company. In fact, as soon as we recognized the imminent restriction of human contact, we defined a virtual process to allow our clients—bank, appraisers, and customers—in safely continuing their operations. Furthermore, our SaaS-based DATAGIS platform empowered customers by assisting them in performing critical workflow optimization tasks and communicate with other stakeholders from the comfort of their homes. Above all, the COVID-19 pandemic gave us the opportunity to re-invent our process and deliver a better solution.

What does the future hold for DATAGIS?

Assessing the future is challenging owing to the COVID-19 pandemic but owing to the core competencies of our ERP solution and our partnership with ESRI, we are aiming to scale our business to other Latin American countries, starting with Colombia, Panama and Ecuador, beyond Costa Rica and Peru. In pursuit of this, we are seeking distribution and strategic partnerships with emerging technology firms in the LATAM real estate arena and starting our second round of venture capital fundraising. As the CEO of DATAGIS, I feel very confident that the future of my company is poised to capitalize on the rising market opportunities in the real estate, mortgage, and appraisal industries.