maps&comps
Mobile apps can improve job
performance while in the field
Your job requires you to conduct a lot of
business out of the office, and these apps
can make it easier when you’re on the go.
OUT OF
OFFICE
Website offers easy access to mapping
tools and other resources
By John Cirincione, SRA
No Siri? No problem! Check
out Vlingo, a virtual assistant
app that can make phone calls,
send emails and text messages,
search the Internet and give
you directions to your next property using
voice recognition technology. Available
for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, select
Windows phones and Symbian.
www.vlingo.com
Free
Informed Appraiser includes more than 40 categories, from affordable housing to socioeconomic and demographic info (left). The site is populated by user-submitted content; appraisers can suggest sites (below) and, if approved, the links are added to the database.
INERTRAK
Inertrak can help you keep tabs on
how you’re spending your time. Use
this app on your iPhone or iPad to
track the time you spend on a par-
ticular project or at a property. Within the app,
you can see the daily totals for each project,
check off days, add notes and view a summary
of overall time totals for each project.
www.inertron.com
$1.99
THE TOOLBAR, FAVORITE BAR AND
HISTORY TABS of an appraiser’s computer
typically are overrun by website lists and links that
have grown too large and too cumbersome to be of
any practical use.
That was the situation Marc Kushner, Associate member, found with his computer. Kushner,
a commercial appraiser and senior associate at
Miller Cicero LLC in New York, developed Informed
Appraiser ( www.informedappraiser.com) as a
way to organize important websites. The result:
an easy-to-navigate, specialized database where
appraisers and other real estate professionals can
find relevant online sources for market data and
other information.
The site has more than 40 categories for such
resources as maps, mapping and GIS; cap rates;
market reports, statistics, analysis and commentary; rental information; and sales listings and
transactions. Each category typically contains
multiple sources; maps, mapping and GIS, for
example, currently lists more than 35 websites
under subcategories, including aerial imagery,
street maps, historical maps, flood maps and
parcel maps, among others.
Informed Appraiser also identifies whether
referring websites require a membership or a
GWABBIT
Save valuable time and
energy managing your
contacts by relying on gwabbit to
do the work for you. This technology, available on BlackBerry devices, scans incoming
emails, finds contacts and creates a new contact in your address book. Once you confirm
the new content, the contact will be alerted
that he/she has been “gwabbed.”
Free
www.gwabbit.com
Free
fee, so there’s no wasted time hunting for the
fine print.
Once a user specifies their location, search
results are returned with four categories for
each site:
■ Link to site.
■ Site description.
■ Membership requirements, if any.
■ Fee requirements, if applicable.
Users also have the ability to submit site
recommendations that, once approved, are
added to the database. In fact, that’s how the
site continues to grow. Informed Appraiser went
live in 2009 as an empty vessel that quickly was
populated by user-submitted content.
Check out Informed Appraiser to see how
useful a tool it can be. The site is free, but
registration is required.
John Cirincione, SRA, is the Appraisal Institute’s
representative to MISMO for residential data standards,
and serves as director of business development for JVI
Appraisal Divisions, LLC in Lake Mary, Fla. He can be
reached by email at jcirincione@jvisolutions.com.
