Software for Real Estate Professionals

     Software for Real Estate Professionals, Inc (SFREP) prides itself on being part of the cutting edge in software technology. SFREP is a provider of innovative software tools for the real estate appraiser, and is committed to providing complete real estate software solutions to both appraiser and lending institutions.

     To provide practical software solutions of unsurpassable quality and value for the mortgage lending and appraisal industry. To obtain this, we use only the best and most advantageous new technologies.

     The Residential Appraiser was originally developed in Basic. As time passed and the suite of products grew, the code was ported to C, then C++. Today SFREP employs Microsoft's newest visual programming tools to take advantage of technologies such as OLE Automation in its current development efforts.

     SFREP builds industry-specific solutions for customers, who may, in turn be provided with custom interfaces for their individual applications. By providing industry-wide solutions, SFREP takes advantage of the economies available when providing products to a large number of customers. At the same time, SFREP allows itself to respond to the needs of the individual customer, by providing flexible products capable of interfacing with existing systems or providing custom interfaces and add-ons as required by the individual customer.

A privately held company, SFREP was founded in 1983. It later incorporated in Louisiana in 1986. SFREP is now held equally by Wayne Pugh, one of the founders, and John and Robin Kevlin.

In the early 80's, there were few software products available for the real estate appraiser. At this time, interest in providing software applications for appraisers began to increase as a result of four factors:

• Computer price\performance ratios were improving dramatically.
• Common word processing hardware and software were found on desktop computers.
• Disk storagedevices were attaining higher capacity.
• Multiple Listing Service databases and county courthouse record databases were becoming more readily available.

SFREP's first product, The Residential Appraiser, was a DOS-based software package that assisted appraisers in completing appraisal forms. It was released in 1984, decreasing costs, increasing performance\capacity factors, and the emergence of the desktop computer as low cost storage medium were especially important to the appraisal market. Previously, storage media and main frame computers had been too costly to handle the large amounts of data required for maintaining current appraisal data.

Additionally, sales data was becoming available via modem access at no cost to anyone doing business within the applicable geographical area. Unfortunately for the appraiser, the data was difficult to access and store with the computer means available at that time. These difficulties presented SFREP with an opportunity to develop a new market. In 1991, SFREP released MLS Scan, which allowed appraisers to download Multiple Listing Service database information directly into the Comparable Sales Database of The Residential Appraiser.

Meanwhile, Kevlin, as Director of Research and Development, decided that SFREP should be part of the emerging Microsoft Windows technologies, and began to develop a counterpart to The Residential Appraiser based in the new Windows operating environment. By doing so, Kevlin felt that the Windows environment would ultimately offer greater flexibility for the real estate appraiser, not only in terms of hardware, but would also offer expanded interoperability with other applications.

SFREP based this Windows product on a forms engine which provided an easy, cost effective method of producing an ever-increasing variety of forms for the appraiser. This allowed SFREP to become a leader in Windows-based technologies for the appraiser.

In 1993, the appraisal industry decided to adopt Electronic Data Interchange (EDI ). It was decided at that time, that SFREP would also embrace EDI as a primary strategy for providing solutions to not only the appraiser but also mortgage lending institutions.

Since then, SFREP has succeeded in acquiring a significant number of high profile customers in the mortgage lending industry. SFREP has also been in direct contact with Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Employee Relocation Council, the Mortgage Bankers Association, and other mortgage lending industry leaders in conjunction with the EDI Workgroup, SFREP is a major contributor to the EDI Workgroup and frequently acts as a consultant to the workgroup for EDI mapping, transaction set infrastructure and other issues involving the practical application of EDI. SFREP is a voting member of the Accredited Standards Committee (ASC) X12 Data Interchange Standards Association, Inc. (DISA), and a member of the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA).