Print

Email story

Comment

Letter to the editor

A home appraisal in just two clicks

One: a photographer's camera. Two: an online client's mouse.

By JAMES THORNER, Times Staff Writer
Published October 16, 2007

Julie Johnson photographs homes in Town 'N Country recently for Zaio Corp., which is building an online database of homes in the United States that can put appraisals a mouse click away. She says she has photographed about 18,000 homes.
	[Chris Zuppa | Times]

ADVERTISEMENT [Chris Zuppa | Times] Julie Johnson, who is a registered appraiser and photographer for Zaio Corp., photographs Town 'N Country homes for a database that will provide real-time appraisals for real estate professional, home buyers, lenders and anyone else who wants to pay. "I go through lots of sunscreen," she said.

With hopes of creating a massive file to revolutionize home appraisals, photographers are taking pictures of close to 900,000 homes in Pinellas, Pasco and Hillsborough counties.

The Tampa Bay area is one of the first markets targeted by Zaio Corp., a startup company based in Canada whose goal is to photograph 90 percent of the homes in the United States.

Combing local neighborhoods since April, Zaio's photographers have captured 489,000 homes on camera. The photos will feed a database to provide online, real-time appraisals for real estate professionals, bankers and anyone else who wants to pay.

"We have 152,920 photos in Pinellas as of today," Mark Silverstein, the company's local representative, said recently as teams worked neighborhoods in North Pinellas and west Pasco.

Formed in 2001 and publicly traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange since 2004, Zaio is set on modernizing an appraisal process it says has changed little in 100 years. The goal is to trim the average time of an appraisal from 7 days to 30 seconds.

Its Photographing America project has collected 10-million street-level home images so far. A further 80,000 pictures feed the database each day, with the goal of completing the project in less than six years.

"Our goal is to photograph, appraise and store every property in America," said chief executive Tom Inserra, based at Zaio's U.S. office in Arizona. But "there could be some remote villages in Alaska where it's not economically feasible."

Zaio has divided the country into 7,500 zones and partners with local appraisers who collect and update data in each zone.

The Tampa Bay area is divided into 65 territories, 12 of which are controlled by Silverstein's company, BayOne Appraisal Services. For example, Silverstein will catalog the roughly 40,000 homes in New Tampa and 18,000 homes in Hillsborough's Westchase community.

In the name of accuracy, appraisers have to visit every street in person once a year. That way they can note any new homes built or old homes razed.

Zaio claims the images, together with its proprietary "GeoScore" property rating system, combats mortgage fraud. It's hard to turn your frog of a home into a prince - or vice versa - if verification is a couple of clicks away in the Zaio system.

Zaio's stock, which traded for pennies for much of the life of the company, has shot up in value about 20 times since data collection began about a year ago. Shares now trade at about $3.25.

Locally, the Zaio teams will photograph remaining neighborhoods through the end of the year, armed with badges and explanatory pamphlets in English and Spanish.

Tampa will be only one of a few regions completed so far, along with Phoenix, Spokane, Wash., and a couple of others.

Only one category of home is getting mostly passed over: multimillion-dollar mansions. They're generally too unique and isolated for Zaio to photograph and appraise accurately.

James Thorner can be reached at (813) 226-3313 or thorner@sptimes.com.

[Last modified October 16, 2007, 07:00:45]