First American Residential Value View, a well-known provider of broker-price opinions, said Monday that the company has completed more than 3 million BPOs since its inception in 1995. The company manages a nationwide network of more than 14,000 licensed real estate and valuation professionals to create independent third-party opinions of value, known as broker price opinions, or BPOs. BPOs are commonly used in situations where a traditional appraisal might be deemed to costly or time consuming, particularly surrounding borrower defaults and loss mitigation efforts — which means that “doing BPOs” is a growth business for more than a few residential real estate agents. It’s also the traditional front-door to listing and selling bank-owned real estate; more than a few agents told HW that “doing BPOs” is how they got into the business of being an REO agent. The Salt Lake City-based company counts seven of the 10 largest servicers among its client base, it said in a press statement. “The steady rise in defaults and foreclosures is driving the demand for more broker price opinions,” said Joni Pierce, chief operating officer of First American Residential Value View. “Our volume is up by 44 percent from July 2007 through June 2008, as compared to the same period the year before, and we recently passed the 3 million BPO milestone mark.” Something tells us that First American isn’t the only company seeing a rise in BPO volumes; nearly everyone competing in the space, including Truckee, Calif.-based Clear Capital Corp., is seeing volume head through the roof. For more information, visit http://www.farvv.com.

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