Oklahoma City, OK, July 25, 2003 – The more than 13.6 million individual real estate appraisal reports submitted by real estate appraisers to their lender clients via a la mode's Mercury Network servers during the past 12 months are an indicator that the mortgage boom is not abating. Appraisal-related file requests and transactions, such as location and flood map downloads, desktop production software update queries and appraisal report exchanges between appraisers and loan officer clients are the most reliable leading indicator of mortgage volume.

Such data represents mortgage loans in process, not including those quashed at the application level, applications on the same property duplicated among different mortgage lenders, or borrower back-out prior to due diligence. Averaging 1.25 megabytes each, these appraisal files represent more than 13 terabytes of data processed by a la mode’s Mercury Network.

a la mode’s Mercury Network is the largest transaction platform in the mortgage industry, serving more than half of U.S. appraisers and essentially all of the nation’s loan officers and mortgage brokers. Some of the various transaction types and volumes processed via the Mercury Network in the past 12 months include:

· Location maps downloaded from Mercury Network Servers - 12,313,717

· Property addresses geo-coded by Mercury Network Servers - 54,533,818

· Flood Hazard maps downloaded from InterFlood Servers - 1,860,500

· Desktop production software update queries and downloads - 3,320,813

· Appraisal report transactions between appraisers and loan officers - 13,612,426

"The continued upward trend in transaction volume has kept our servers and our staff as busy as our appraiser and lender customers," said Mike Unser, a la mode Product Line Manager. "It continues to be a historically busy time for mortgage and appraisal professionals, and we can say with confidence, based on our server volume, that it shows no sign of slowing down in the immediate future."

A redundant 35 megabit fiber backbone is the core of the substantial infrastructure required to support this level of transaction volume. The Mercury Network is an open architecture platform of desktop software and Internet servers, supporting XML data standards established by the Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization (MISMO).

a la mode's real estate appraiser members subscribe to the Mercury Network to connect to their mortgage lending clients while using the report form filling software of their choice, while all Mercury Network members, including mortgage lender and broker members, enjoy solutions to common industry collateral workflow problems, which have not been sufficiently addressed by Internet portals or legacy report-conversion products.

a la mode software tools are developed as reliable Microsoft .NET services, so the scalability and portability of the products provide a level of control and confidence unavailable to mortgage technology professionals in the past.

About a la mode, inc.
a la mode, inc. is the leader in the design, development and support of real estate related software, Internet solutions and electronic document technologies. The company's flagship product, WinTOTAL, is used by more than 50 percent of the nation's real estate appraisers - nearly three times the share of its closest competitor. a la mode's Mercury Network (http://www.alamode.com/mercury) servers delivered more than 13.6 million electronic appraisals in the past 12 months, making it the undisputed leader in paperless real estate transactions.