Snapwire

Situs Takes Equity in Snapwire

12.05.07 - Austin, TX

Situs' second acquisition in 30 days provides tech solutions for CRE appraisers

HOUSTON (Dec. 5, 2007) - Marking its second acquisition in the past 30 days, officials of Situs Companies announced today the Houston-based global real estate services firm has acquired an equity interest in Snapwire, a business-process management firm based in Austin, Tex.

Snapwire is best known for developing ReportBuilder 2.0, a report-writing software designed for commercial real estate appraisers and brokers.

The Snapwire relationship closely follows Situs' October 29th announcement that the firm had taken an equity position in CLOSER, a web-based loan-origination and pipeline-management system developed by Franklin, Tenn.-based Conjunction Consulting, LLC.

COO and Principal Steven Powel said Situs has a long-standing dedication to developing and exploring commercial real estate technology and these acquisitions represent end-to-end technology solutions that will provide greater efficiency and cost savings.

"Commercial real estate professionals want to see and touch things," said Powel. "But in an era where the capital markets and commercial real estate companies have to produce more and do it faster, technology is the obvious solution for making substantive gains in saving time and money. Snapwire and CLOSER can revolutionize the transparency, efficiency and speed of not only aggregating but also reporting data."

According to Snapwire Senior Partner and Co-founder Corey Smith, Situs' global presence and real estate relationships built over the past 22-plus years will be instrumental in making significant inroads with commercial real estate appraisers.

Smith said the 4-year-old company currently has ReportBuilder users in North America, Mexico, Greece, New Zealand and Puerto Rico. He sees significant upside potential in domestic markets as turnaround time, standardization, and electronic transmittal are increasingly an issue with lenders even while the market is dictating less manpower.

"ReportBuilder morphs the typical two- to three-week timeframe down to a matter of days," said Smith.

When drafting a new appraisal, Smith said appraisers typically use a previously completed appraisal as a template and replace the old data and comparables using Microsoft Word's find/replace and copy/paste options. He said this manual process is time consuming and lends to human error and increased cost. Snapwire automates this process, thus increasing the productivity and efficiency for the appraiser while simultaneously benefiting the lenders via electronic capture and transmittal of critical underwriting data points.

"We're not replacing the appraiser," said Smith. "We are enabling the appraiser to focus on the analytics instead of being clerical experts in Word and Excel."

Smith said Snapwire is customizable to the particular needs and interests of a company and that data can be securely stored online by the customer so that it is accessible for searching and data capture when away from the office.

More information on Snapwire can be found at www.snapwired.com.

The Situs Companies (www.situscompanies.com) is a leading provider of commercial real estate services and consulting solutions for all property types to financial institutions, institutional investors, private owners and developers. Headquartered in Houston since its' founding in 1985, the firm employs over 350 real estate professionals in offices throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. During 2006, Situs conducted due diligence assignments involving over 10,000 properties worldwide.

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