So much of what the labs is cranking out empowers you to provide different, better, faster client service. Think about the time savings of a field data collector/sketcher in one that synchs up to WinTOTAL back at the office. Or being able to include Virtual Earth satellite and oblique imagery in your reports. All very cool and also all part of an overall marketing strategy on your part: You don't just compete on price, you compete on turn time, getting it right the first time, and providing extras others don't.

We recently launched a 10-minute online appraiser marketing survey to help us as a company understand what kinds of things are working and not working for you, and how we can develop tools and provide information that'll help. As a reader of this blog and follower of the labs project, you're interested in solving real life problems. If you could take 10 minutes of your time to fill out our marketing survey, you'd be helping us achieve the same goal on behalf of all our appraiser customers.

Access the survey by clicking here. Thanks in advance for your participation!

After a couple hundred of the earliest responses, here are the kinds of thing we're learning:

• 90 percent of you are spending less than $5,000 this year on marketing/advertising. 57 percent are spending less than $1,000.



• More than half of you are making an effort in 2007 to market to new types of clients or get new types of business.



• You think the most important areas you can be marketing to to get new business are Foreclosure/REO appraisals, divorce/probate attorneys and relocation appraisals.

Note that final data may change as responses continue to roll in. Won't you please take the survey yourself and get us the best data possible? Thanks!