The Residential Bidding feature takes the logic behind the Commercial order requesting bids process and merges it with the traditional Residential round-robin panel rotation. To enable Residential Bidding, access Relationships, chose a Division, select Edit Settings, and expand the General section.



The first section relates to settings pertaining to the Placing Orders process. Enable the box adjacent to Allow Bid Requests.



Once you enable Allow Bid Requests, this feature will allow appraisers to supply a bid with a turn time and fee cost. Pick the winning bid to assign the order. You can choose to request bids when you place an order, or switch to a bidding process after the order is created. Three additional sub-settings will populate after Allow Bid Requests has been enabled.


  • Require Bidding – This setting will automatically mark the Request Bid feature on the new order screen, ensuring Residential orders at the time of placement are marked as 'bidding.' Once this setting is enabled, Supervisors and Originators will not be able to edit this field. 

  

  • Restrict Bid Requests to Administrators Only – By default, all users can choose to request bids when ‘Allow Bid Requests’ is enabled. Enable this additional feature to only have it available to administrator users and suppressed for supervisors and originators.


  • Auto-Request Bids – By default, administrator users need to manually select which appraisers to request bids from. With the ‘Auto-Request Bids’ feature enabled, whenever a user places a bidding order, the system will automatically request bids from all eligible appraisers on your appraiser panel.


  • Allow Managed Users to Review Bids – By default, only administrator users can view and accept a bid. Enable this checkbox to allow supervisor and originator users to be able to view and accept appraiser bids. Appraiser name and contact information is still suppressed from managed users with this feature enabled.

 

These sub-settings provide additional refinement for your origination process but are not required to utilize the Residential Bidding feature.