PAST

In the early 90s, Dart’s business was incredibly transactional – a typical volume month would be 1,000 orders from 800 separate clients. While that business model was profitable for Dart, it didn’t allow us to really get to know our customers and go beyond the role of a typical service provider.

In the late 2000s, lenders increasingly turned to AMCs to manage their valuations (especially after the real estate crash, and the regulations that followed). Dart began expanding relationships with our clients – we wanted to get to know their needs and requirements to provide even better service. Soon, true partnerships began to take shape.

We helped our clients redesign their appraisal processes to be compliant in a new era of regulation, and created new technology integrations to simplify the process. As one of the country’s original AMCs, lenders could trust Dart’s experience to not only process orders, but to do so in a compliant, timely fashion.

PRESENT

Today, Dart’s business model is centered on partnerships. Our mission statement is “To create value for our partners by delivering innovative solutions that improve the appraisal management process.” The bulk of our volume comes from our top clients, a big change from how we operated 25 years ago. Dart aims to achieve true partnership with all of our clients, which means establishing relationships throughout the client’s business and fostering open and transparent communication. We want to go beyond a typical service provider, and discover ways we can add value and efficiency to our clients’ business. On top of regular communication about files and metrics, we host regular “white boarding” sessions with our clients to discover even more ways we can be of service.

FUTURE

Dart will continue to focus on developing partnerships with all of our clients. We know our unique level of experience in the industry, combined with our commitment to process excellence, can be a true value add to our lender partners. Our management team conducts on-site visits to our clients on a regular basis, and clients come to our offices frequently as well. 

Looking forward, we want to serve as a consultative resource for our clients on all valuation-related issues, from product and process topics up through fee analysis and compliance matters. We will continue to add more product types to meet our clients’ needs. Dart is also committed to adding staff appraisers in key counties to support our partnerships.