C A SE S TUDY

Rumball Sedgwick increases surveyor productivity with Q-MobileRumball Sedgwick is a multi-discipline firm of Chartered Surveyors that has been carrying out surveys and valuations on behalf of all major banks and building societies since around 1750.

The company works in the Northern Home Counties, including Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire and north London with two o� ices based in St Albans and Watford. It has a team of five experienced valuation surveyors, two surveying assistants and two administration sta� .

Rumball Sedgwick is a long-standing customer of Landmark Valuation Services and has transitioned its team over to Q-Mobile, Landmark’s mobile surveying app, to capture mortgage valuation site notes and lender reports digitally. We caught up with Managing Director, Tim Hollingsworth, to discuss his teams’ experiences with the product.

Rumball Sedgwick’s key challengesWe all know that the residential surveying industry is very competitive, with lots of changes happening in recent years, so we started by asking Tim what he sees as the main challenges for Rumball Sedgwick.

“Banks and building societies have changed their way of working. We no longer receive work directly from the lender, instead it comes through an intermediary who manages the work on their behalf for a fee. This means we have a tight time window in which to process the work – generally three days for a valuation and five days for a HomeBuyers survey.

As well as meeting short ‘turn around’ time frames, we are heavily audited - the instructing panel will normally audit about 10% of our work each month.

We need to meet audit requirements by providing all the required information when requested, meaning we have to capture the right information and store it in a way that makes it easy to access.”

Key business drivers for adopting Q-MobileThe above industry challenges have created a number of business drivers that led to Tim deciding to adopt a mobile reporting strategy with Q-Mobile, as he explains:

“We needed to find an app that would capture our site notes quickly and easily with the ability to add photos and annotated plans that could transfer the data into the lender forms with little extra work for us. We needed to be able to save all our files into a secure central system and have them available at a click of the mouse.

Q-Mobile was perfect for us as it did all these things and more. By moving to DataWeb at the same time it meant that our worries over data storage and backing up of the data was a thing of the past, as this was all now securely managed for us by Landmark.”

What benefits has Rumball Sedgwick seen with Q-Mobile?“Q-Mobile has helped us to increase our e� iciency and saves surveyors time. They no longer have to fa� about with paper and pen, scanning, downloading documents or photos or find a camera or handheld gadget to help them do their work.

The automatic lender form mapping as we complete the site notes really helps with e� iciency. There may be some pieces of data which are not mapped, but that’s good as it makes the surveyor check the report before it’s signed o� . Our surveyors are seeing a 20-25% time saving benefit through using Q-Mobile – which we’re delighted with!

Increasing our compliance is a key benefit as well. The surveyor is able to ensure that the site notes are complete without missing anything as the system does not allow them to sign o� the report until it is 100% correct. There are very easy ways to save documents, photos, and sales information into the system which enables them to complete the job in a very thorough way. We find that by using Q-Mobile we are actually becoming keener on saving supporting information because we can do it so easily.”

Rumball SedgwickRumball Sedgwick

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CASE STUDY Q-Mobile – Rumball Sedgwick©2017 Landmark Information Group | v1.0

Dealing with post valuation queries (PVQs) and lender audits more e� ectively are also key benefits, as Tim explains:

“Historically, PVQs were a problem. If there was a paper file, first we had to locate it – that was not always an easy task with the quantity of files that we had. If the file was in an archive store, there was a time delay to retrieve it which meant missing the PVQ deadline. As Q-Mobile sends all case data to DataWeb, we can easily respond to a PVQ from anywhere as long as we have a computer with internet access. The process is now altogether more e� icient – we’re seeing a 50-60% time saving per PVQ, which ensures we meet deadlines 100% of the time.

Q-Mobile saves us a lot of time when it comes to lender audits. The simple fact that you can save everything easily to a central file means that when an audit is requested on a set of site notes, these can now be returned within minutes. Before it may have taken hours to get the data in the right format, not to mention scanning files which were then too large to email!”

What’s the feedback from the surveying team been like?The Rumball Sedgwick surveying team is very happy with Q-Mobile and Tim took us through some of the benefits that his surveyors have fed back to him:

“Q-Mobile really helps our surveyors whilst onsite. Many of them will readily admit that they have poor handwriting, but with Q-Mobile all the site notes they capture are legible, tidy, and consistent. They find it very beneficial to have confirmation that all matters have been addressed before they leave the site. They also like the fact that the Rightmove SCT is connected to Q-Mobile as it allows them to see comparable data at the time they need it.”

As a surveyor himself, we asked Tim what Q-Mobile features he likes best:

“Apart from the site notes being captured in one easy place, one of the best features is the sketch tool. When you draw on the tablet you can easily label the drawing with details about the property. You simply drop and drag the bedrooms, bathroom and other rooms onto the drawing and this is populated into the site notes. If there is dampness, you annotate the drawing and that is also completed in the site notes for you. It makes data entry a one-time activity which means you don’t repeat work and saves a great deal of time.”

Rumball Sedgwick did trial a competing product, but they preferred Q-Mobile:

“We trialled an alternative to Q-Mobile for a year using the Apple iPad, but we found it to be limited. We decided to switch to Q-Mobile as it is more robust and it works well with DataWeb, so it was an easy decision for us. One of our recently qualified surveyors who trialled the iPad App has also said he prefers Q-Mobile.”

So, would Rumball Sedgwick recommend Q-Mobile?We finished the interview by asking Tim whether he would recommend Q-Mobile to other surveying firms that are considering adopting mobile technology:

“I would most certainly recommend Q-Mobile as a solution for surveys and valuations as I believe it is the best in the market. It is comprehensive and a delight to use. It meets lenders’ audit requirements, removes the paper mountain that we used to create, reduces errors and produces the reports and site note files that are required really e� iciently.

With the integration to DataWeb for secure data storage, it also takes away the worry of data back up and file space. As a surveyor who has been doing this type of work for over 25 years I am delighted at the way it helps us carry out our work.”

Ready to sign up?Contact us at LVSInfo@landmark.co.uk to book a personalised demo with one of our Q-Mobile experts. They will be able to show you how Q-Mobile can help you on the go and will explain how to sign up.

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“Apart from the site notes being captured in one easy place, one of the best features is the sketch tool. When you draw on the tablet you can easily label the drawing with details about the property. You simply drop and drag the bedrooms, bathroom and other rooms onto the drawing and this is populated into the site notes. If there is dampness, you annotate the drawing and that is also completed in the site notes for you. It makes data entry a one-time activity which means you don’t repeat work