iWave Announces Advanced Real Estate Capacity Calculations

CHARLOTTETOWN & IRVINE, APRIL 20, 2020 / – iWave is thrilled to announce the launch of our newest screening enhancement, an industry-leading real estate equalizer. New capability from Core Logic, helps ensure more accurate calculations when using real estate as a key indicator of capacity by including Median Home Price into the calculation to determine how a property is valued in relation to others around it. 

Real estate is often chosen as a key indicator of a prospective donors’ capacity but frequently when making the calculations all property values are treated equally irrespective of the cost of living in the area. 

Having heard consistently from clients that using static real estate values over inflate wealth in some areas, iWave understood the gravity of the problem.  Using a hypothetical situation of owning a primary residence property in different areas across the United States: 

Current data vendors do not use a formula for capacity that considers the cost of living in an area,  For example, a donor who owns $1M property in San Francisco is most likely not as wealthy as an individual who owns a $1M property in a rural area of Nebraska.  Historically, those two individuals would be given the same capacity in a traditional screening because there was no review of the cost of living and median price value of each area.  This has forced nonprofits to do manual calculations when screening databases, especially when their donors are spread across many regions. With the new enhancement to iWave, that value will be calculated regionally to better reflect what a $1M (or any value for that matter) home value really means in true wealth and capacity. No more overestimation of wealth in areas of the country where the cost of real estate is very high. 

This enhancement to iWave’s wealth screening and capacity scoring now includes median home price of a county as a good indicator of the cost of living in a geographical area so nonprofit fundraising and research professionals can better ensure the quality and accuracy of a prospective donor’s capacity when using real estate as an indicator. 

This new enhancement comes on the heels of the launch of iWave’s new platform that is built on next-generation architecture and features a fresh modern design and intuitive layout. The new platform is faster, more powerful, and more scalable, allowing new enhancements and functionality to be added quickly and easily. 

“We added this new enhancement to help our clients more effectively and accurately assess a donor’s capacity to give,” said Mary Cote, VP of Product. “We have found that real estate is one of the top wealth indicators used to estimate capacity so it was important to ensure we are providing the most accurate and actionable data possible. iWave consulted with industry experts and heard that although a common practice is to use house value to determine capacity, it was just not good enough. We wanted to improve this by adjusting our capacity calculation algorithms for everyone to benefit. We now have an incredibly robust new backend to the platform that has laid the foundation for future innovation and growth. For our clients, this will mean faster and more reliable results, more functionality, as well as additional data and integrations.”

“At iWave, we pride ourselves on being at the forefront of nonprofit fundraising innovation with an agile development process that leverages client and industry insights to continuously bring more value, along with the best customer service in the industry to our nonprofits, higher education, and healthcare organizations”, said CEO Ross Beattie.  “We will continue to have a number of new announcements throughout 2020 that will continue to ensure iWave is the leading provider of nonprofit fundraising solutions.”

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The Kindsight Team