Why Reggora’s 24-hour appraisal is going to become “the new standard”
Live from the expo hall at MBA Annual in Las Vegas, HousingWire President Diego Sanchez spoke with Reggora CEO and Co-Founder Brian Zitin about a game-changing development in the mortgage industry: 24-hour appraisals.
“For decades, appraisals have been the bottleneck around everything,” Zitin said. “Even in 2021, during the refi boom, appraisals were taking literally weeks and holding up everything. So we made it our mission to reduce the turn time as much as possible.”
Reggora’s new 24-hour appraisal, available on the majority of conventional transactions, is designed to eliminate that friction. “This isn’t a one-off product,” Zitin emphasized. “This will be the new standard of how Reggora will get it done moving forward.”
Delivering on that promise required a significant technological investment. “Over the lifetime of Reggora, we’ve raised $80 million — most of that has gone into engineering and R&D,” Zitin explained. “We have our core appraisal platform that hundreds of customers use to manage the full process. But we realized that no matter how much software we built, if we weren’t in control of our own destiny in terms of fulfillment, there was only so much we could do.”
That realization led to the creation of Reggora’s own appraisal marketplace, licensed as an AMC in all 50 states. “We can actually fulfill appraisals as well,” he said. “The 24-hour appraisal is a hybrid model — someone who’s not the appraiser does the inspection, then sends that data to the appraiser, who completes the report from their desk.”
To make that possible, Reggora built its own mobile app for inspections. “We do a LiDAR scan, gather all the information — everything from ordering to fulfillment to the appraiser’s analysis,” Zitin said. “It’s the full workflow.”
Reggora’s data collectors are another key component. “They’re real estate professionals — agents, insurance adjusters, foreclosure specialists — who go through our own training program and background checks,” he said. “Our mobile app walks them through every step, like TurboTax: take a picture of the bathroom, the kitchen, the exterior, and it outputs the required dataset.”
The company’s goal is to complete the property inspection early in the mortgage process. “That way, when you’re ready to order the appraisal, it’s already done,” Zitin explained. “We just send it to the appraiser for a 24-hour turnaround.”
The initiative is designed for national scalability. “There’s nothing preventing this from being done nationwide,” Zitin said. “Most appraisers can complete the report in three to four hours once they have the data.”
The 24-hour appraisal is available through Reggora’s appraisal marketplace. “It started with traditional appraisals and is now the most used vendor across our entire platform,” he said. “If the normal appraisal takes five to 10 days, ours are already 20–30% faster — and now we’ve taken it to another level.”
Zitin also acknowledged the changes in the appraisal workforce. “This will be controversial,” he said, “but one of the main reasons Fannie and Freddie added hybrid appraisals is because of the declining appraiser population. An appraiser can now do two or three of these a day at their desk, instead of one in the field. These products are purpose-built for that future.”
While some appraisers remain resistant to change, Zitin has noticed significant adoption. “We polled tens of thousands of appraisers — the majority want to do this. Of course, we monitor quality closely, with analytics, training, and scorecards to ensure collaboration between data collectors and appraisers.”
As for what comes next, Zitin believes that Reggora is only getting started. “We just raised another $18 million, and most of it’s going into engineering,” he said. “We release new updates every two weeks. It’s about scaling the company while making the process more frictionless.”
For lenders, Zitin poses a simple question. “If you can get the same appraisal in six days or 24 hours, what are you going to choose?” Zitin asked. “This is going to be the new standard.”
