The Problems with ValueTech...
Bill,
Lorenzo works with me and I just ran across your unanswered questions...
Much of the following is from my final email to one of the owners of ValueTech (VT), recounting my troubles with the software. Hopefully it answers your questions, but in short, our problems were not learning curve related - they were due to functional obsolescence!!!
When I was sold VT it was my understating that after a few hours of training I would be good to go. But unless one doesn’t care about the continuity of the look and feel of their reports VT, out-of-the-box, has little functionality.
I started a report immediately after getting it and after filling in the front-end and populating the template I found that the templates were just plain ugly. You can view them at:
http://www.valuetechsoftware.com/templates.html
The fill-in portion of the program has tons of fields we would rarely use in a summary and much of the data goes into tables that are difficult to edit, and without editing I simply couldn't send out the report.
So I set aside the program for about six months.
Then when I came back to it with renewed vigor, I emailed VT two times asking if they offer a template redesign service, or if there was a company out there that they could refer me to. I received no reply.
So I found a company on my own to handle the templates. Since they had no experience with VT the process was clumsy, but they managed to take the VT templates and my format and merge them into an acceptable set of bookmarked files. I say acceptable, because, the files still needed a ton of polishing, but I figured we could do that as we went along.
So, with templates in hand I decided it was time to move on to the next fiasco… VT uses a light (free) version of MSSQL and it installs it on each computer unless you have a LAN in which case you can share it between computers. But we worked in different locations at the time, so we decided to set it up with a remotely shared database. Due to a complete lack of documentation it took two months working with the support and was a royal pain, but finally, in the end we found that a single line of code needed to be changed so that the database would operate with a remote host. Once we got it done, the DB was really slow, but we figured we could live with it and continued on.
So, on to the next step we went… As it stood, I figured it would take about 20 to 30 minutes to fill-out a single comparable in the form fields. This was significantly longer than cutting and pasting from a PDF of the sales into our old templates, so it was apparent that we needed a way to populate the database from an XL export file. I contacted VT to determine the potential for importing comps from a .csv file and they indicated that I should probably wait until the new import utility came out - in a month.
A little over a month later I ran the import utility and imported 28 sales into the database. I was stunned by the amount of data that did not import into the DB. It became readily apparent that VT’s database was not designed around Costar’s field data.
So I called the VT to complain and ended up with a good lesson on database redesign. So with my newfound knowledge I spent 5 hours the next morning completely redesigning the VT sales database in order to import all the Costar fields. I ran the utility and re-imported the 28 sales and all the data merged into it.
Then I went to work on the land sales database. Costar uses all the same fields for land and improved sale, and VT has a “copy database” function, so this should have been easy to simply copy the sales database and use the import profile I had created for the sales… Nope… it wouldn’t work due to naming parameters and I was left looking at another 5 hours of mind numbing DB redesign ahead of me.
At that point I gave up – again. In the meantime, VT was telling me that a year had passed since my purchase of the program and it was time to pay for a service agreement. But I had never produced a report in the program.
I convinced them to give me a three month extension of service. About two months later Lorenzo (earlier poster) and I went in with the not-so-firm conviction that we would make the program work for us. We opened the program and it went through an update and voila, it could no longer access the remotely hosted database. That was enough! We uninstalled the software!
All told we spent many hours and thousands of dollars on VT.
It is my feeling that this software could work well for a Fortune 500 company with a technology staff, but for a fee shop it is painful. Moreover, there are no VT experts out there to hire to do the work and VT doesn’t offer that service, so it is all left on the shoulders of the individual to do.
I do think that there is a business to be made of setting up VT for companies, but a complete lack of documentation makes this difficult. On a positive note, I think you could create a new set of databases and save them for reuse from one installation to another installation.
Anyway, hope this answers your questions…
Regards,
Jim Stein
http://www.jamessteinvaluation.com
Bill Lansdowne said:
Calvin & Lorenzo,
Do either of you have the time to explain in more detail your problems or difficulties with Valuetech? Before becoming a appraiser I was in the IT industry, and I have to say that I am extremely impressed with Valuetech from a technical standpoint, but having not used it...I would like to know more. I am most impressed with Valuetech because their product seems highly customizable (if you have the knowledge) and they are using the Appraisal Institute Data Standards, which I haven't found with any other products.
Calvin/Lorenzo...would you say the problem was a complete lack of usability or was the learning curve steeper than ideal, resulting in a lack of usabililty?
To add to this thread...I did have the opportunity to have a first hand demo of the Appraisers Paradise system, from John Urubek, the owner. I most impressed with the fact that the entire system is on the web, making it accessible from anywhere at anytime. It seemed very user friendly, but at this point lacks a comp database. I would advise anyone looking at software to at least check out this product.
