Walker & Dunlop’s Apprise Now Has National Footprint

Walker & Dunlop’s appraisal unit, Apprise, has expanded to the West Coast with the hiring of Jacinto Munoz, managing director and head of strategy and compliance, according to Walker & Dunlop and GeoPhy.

The addition of Munoz effectively completes Apprise’s executive leadership team and its national footprint. Also, Apprise added Russ Zellner, based in Irvine, CA, to oversee commercial and multifamily appraisals throughout the West Coast. Director Eric Roush, Associate Directors Anmmar Alsaggaf, Sevak Tsaturyan and Steven Lee, as well as Associates Steven Mehrabian and Jason Garcia, will also be on the West Coast team.

Before joining Apprise, Munoz and Zellner were at Chase Bank’s CTL Group. Munoz was most recently an executive director and national appraisal manager, while Zellner most recently was a vice president and regional appraisal manager. With 40 years of experience, the pair have held numerous positions in the multifamily appraisal space and are experts in valuing all types of multifamily properties. The group specializes in appraisals to meet Freddie Mac’s, Fannie Mae’s and balance sheet lenders’ compliance requirements.

Apprise is focused on the US market (in 46 states) and serves a client base that includes GSE lenders, owners/operators, banks, and institutional lenders. The platform’s national team now has a collective track record of valuing $150 billion worth of commercial real estate properties, comprising more than 900,000 units per year.

In January 2020, Walker & Dunlop and GeoPhy, a CRE valuation company, launched Apprise with the goal of modernizing the antiquated appraisal process through artificial intelligence. 

 “Over the past four years, the volume of multifamily transactions has spiked 74%, while the number of appraisers has decreased by 10%. The industry’s professionals are trying to keep up with ever-escalating data, but they are doing it manually,” Meghan Czechowski, the valuation lead for Apprise and managing director of the firm’s midwest region, told GlobeSt.com in an earlier interview.

Applying AI to automate some of these processes can lead to valuable savings, she says.

The Apprise application pulls lead unit mix information from multiple sources into the system, and can compare these sources directly to map discrepancies and anomalies, she explains. “The constant updates for apartment unit mixes from industry standard resources coupled with our automated processing of actual rent roll information into unit mixes allows the system to record unit type and floor plan level changes over a period of time allowing appraisers a stronger base for trend analysis and support for rent forecasting within our appraisal reports.”

Apprise appraisers also use Enodo’s AI-based automated rent roll and operating statement parser, Czechowski says. “These features allow appraisers to process rent rolls into unit mixes and four-to-five operating statements in a matter of seconds, as opposed to manual processing which can take over one hour.”