Oklahoma Real Estate Appraisers Board

The challenges of a small regulatory agency

Prior to working with Thentia, one of the primary challenges of the Oklahoma Real Estate Appraiser Board was that as a small agency, it has an equally small budget while still needing to serve its 1400+ licensees. As a result, the board had heavily relied on a paper-based system. Key challenges of the agency included:

• Managing an enormous amount of paperwork
• Approving applications in a timely manner with a small staff
• Employee stress due to the number of applications and the impact of not meeting deadlines, given deadlines imposed by statutory oversight
• High costs associated with printing and mailing documents
• Most software providers offered cost-prohibitive solutions

Before going live on the Thentia Cloud platform, McEntire says the agency’s team was buried in paperwork when it came to managing virtually all the agency’s processes, including licensing, continuing education, complaint management, and more. So much of the agency’s time was spent physically printing, copying, scanning, folding, filling envelopes, moving files between boxes, and so on.

Paperwork created stress for employees too, McEntire says. During the busiest times of the year, many licensees would file their applications the day before their deadline, causing a mountain of paper that had to be processed on an extremely short deadline. Without doing so, licensees could become inactive and unable to work.

The paper-based system was costing the agency approximately $10,000 a year in postage and paper which accounted for a significant portion of their budget. Postage was high because appraiser certificates had to be sent by mail and there wasn’t much, they could do to cut down on printing costs.

When the agency received demonstrations of other software solutions designed to enable online licensing, the costs were always well above what the agency could afford – sometimes as high as $700,000, which was more than their annual budget.

“To be able to move to a digital process has saved the board quite a bit of money, but more importantly, it’s saved our mental health. Our stress level has greatly decreased, and the day-to-day pressure has eased up.” McEntire reports.

Solution details: The decision to move to a digital licensing solution

A few years before McEntire was introduced to Thentia, the state’s governor had put forward an executive order requirement that all state agencies provide online licensing. McEntire spent much time afterward trying to find a solution that would fit their needs, but all were far too expensive.

When McEntire was introduced to Thentia through a former appraiser regulator and connection, she was immediately impressed by the ease of the solution, and that it was affordable. “We honestly loved it and thought it was amazing. Not only was the platform user-friendly, but the cost was also within our budget and that’s really what drove our decision. I had a fire lit under me to get it done.”

Nadia Hosseinzadeh, Senior Manager of Customer Success at Thentia, adds, “We knew from the start that Thentia could make a huge difference to the workload the Oklahoma Real Estate Appraisers Board faced. It was our goal to reduce the burden of paperwork and their high operational costs too. We are delighted to have been able to address these challenges for them.”