DataComp vs Narrative1 vs Datappraise vs Valcre

[Rlong]

Datappraise is owned by Valbridge appraisal company and used in all the Valbridge office franchises, Valbridge has their own templates, so you would have to do your own. I helped a Valbridge office convert to it a number of years back. It is a developed with some quite complex Excel overlays. I thought I would like using Excel as the foundation, but found the complexity and broken links or possibly inadequately "locked" cells quite frustrating; although to their credit it was effectively Beta.

I think it is really geared for (and their focus is on) the Valbridge Offices as they (meaning Datappraise) have put allot of time into their (Valbridge) templates. I think they have some basic templates for "you" but my belief is you would have to put extensive work in to "make it yours" (i.e. maybe more than a 6 person office wants to do). I don't have anything to compare it to, I was always a Word and basic Excel templates guy (no database) prior to that. I went from the Valbridge Office to doing residential (even though I am CG with ample commercial experience) because it paid more in my region.

As others noted I think I hear the most about Narrative 1.

Good Luck

 

[ML2021]

Thank you all for the invaluable advice! It is much appreciated as we are hoping to choose the right software the first time to avoid having to switch in the future and go through the learning curve once again.

@NachoPerito asked what we found out so far.

We have sat through four demos and still need to discuss them. Thus far, the general consensus is that Datappraise is the least expensive, but seems a bit clunky. Valcre is very nice, but, as others have mentioned, is the most expensive. Both Narrative1 and Edge are nice, however, we have knowledge of another firm that left Edge due to issues of crashing/losing data. This may have been during the beta days of the software and it may have been resolved, but it does make us a bit leery.

 

[NachoPerito]

Then there is RealQuantum, which creates reports without Word or Excel. That was too revolutionary for me.

 

[NachoPerito]

Narrative1's online database is called N1web. It isn't perfect and I have been critical because they keep adding unnecessary improvements that give you more boxes to ignore when adding a comp, but they are improving the system and today is evidence of that. Prior to today you could not search all retail properties that have sold. You had to do one search for all the 'retail-commercial' sales then search again for all 'shopping center' sales. But today the finally announced the upgrade to be able to do a sales search with multiple property types

 

[ML2021]

Then there is RealQuantum, which creates reports without Word or Excel. That was too revolutionary for me.

Thanks! RealQuantum was one that we may consider as well. Do you have any idea what the price is on this one?

 

[NachoPerito]

Thanks! RealQuantum was one that we may consider as well. Do you have any idea what the price is on this one?

No.

 

[Terrel L. Shields]

do you copy and paste them from previous reports based on recollection?

No. I copy and paste nothing. I create a folder called "commercial" (also have residential, land, etc). I create subfolders by year. Then each sales write up is a file with a shorthand by city and address or business. When I do a retro I can go back to 1999 and pull up my own sales from then. I also zipped a file (.frm) for a restricted template I have experimented with. The site won't accept a wpd file. I use the merge file functions a lot. Tool>Merge> file.frm

 

[tsiegel]

Thanks! RealQuantum was one that we may consider as well. Do you have any idea what the price is on this one?

I looked very seriously at Real Quantum and even started the process of migrating to it (I am switching from Datappraise as I am tired of all the workarounds and, as others have pointed out, their energy in terms of improvements seems to be largely focused on what Valbridge wants and I don't get the sense that they give a damn what I want at all). I got as far with Real Quantum as moving my database over and setting up my templates in their system.

To reply to your question above, the cost (at the time that I was looking - 2019) was $1,000/user/year.

I truly like the direction that RQ is going with their software. It totally avoids Word and Excel which, at first, gave me heartburn. However, as I started to look at how it functioned, I really felt like it would be so much more efficient to not have to bounce around from web database to excel to word and then back through the chain a thousand times to make edits (as we do in Datappraise). While I really like the direction that RQ is headed, I ended up deciding that they are not doing it in such a way that I could be on board with. There is little to no flexibility in the system to customize the analysis let alone the final report. As an example, they automatically generate a table with my selected cap rate comparables (which is slick the way it is done), but the table did not have all of the columns that I wanted on it. I wanted to add a column for sale remarks, but the system wouldn't allow that to happen.

A further issue on their approach was they way the system handles the narrative portion of the reports. There are all of these text boxes that don't save old text beyond what you store in each template. You cannot just call up something that you have written in the past and modify it for your current subject property.

Once you are all done creating a report with analysis the way the system forces you to, a report is generated into PDF format and you can change exactly NOTHING. This just doesn't work at all. The report mostly looked nice, but there were things that I would have wanted to adjust in terms of formatting and could not. I could not add any narrative at this point or even delete a blank page.

All of this would have been somewhat understandable if I felt like they were working on it. However, while they seem to be making regular improvements, I became extremely concerned that their philosophy was that appraisers don't really know what they need and what they need is standardization and felt that we should be forced into their format so as to achieve this. They don't seem to plan on providing the kind of flexibility that I want.

So I bailed. Way more than you asked for, but I have not had the opportunity to put that rant into writing yet so I guess it was waiting to come out.

 

[tsiegel]

I looked very seriously at Real Quantum and even started the process of migrating to it (I am switching from Datappraise as I am tired of all the workarounds and, as others have pointed out, their energy in terms of improvements seems to be largely focused on what Valbridge wants and I don't get the sense that they give a damn what I want at all). I got as far with Real Quantum as moving my database over and setting up my templates in their system.

I have also started the process of migrating to Report Builder Pro. There are a lot of things that I like about RBP, but honestly, there are a lot of things that concern me there as well. I am now giving N1 and Datacomp/Edge a new look. At the moment I am intrigued by Datacomp/Edge. I am worried that N1 will involve the same level of frustrating workarounds that I have been dealing with for years with Datappraise.

 

[Terrel L. Shields]

I am worried that N1 will involve the same level of frustrating workarounds that I have been dealing with for years with Datappraise.

Which is why I stuck with Word Perfect. I simply spent way too much time "cleaning up" a report in N 1.

With WP I can embed small spreadsheets (unlike the simple math Word allows) so I never leave the report. I do break up the report into an Exhibits section, an approaches section and a summary/intro section. I combine them, then save into pdf. The WP file will be very large, so I reduce the pdf file even more than it does anyway. And I keep that file, if I need to make changes, I go back to the WP file and make those changes but keep the pdf "copy" for file and save under a new name (my naming protocol is file number (year being the first 2 digits) and name - 2101_smith for instance, an amended copy would be 2101x_smith

Each comp goes into my database as a 1 or 2 page comp and is named by town and address ( like Siloam_123Broadway)
I have a subfolder by year - have my data back to about 2000.