American Home Mortgage Holdings Selects realink.com Appraisal Network to Provide Online Appraisals

Business Wire, July 13, 2000

Business Editors

PHOENIX--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 13, 2000

realink.com Appraisal Network Delivers Fast, Accurate

Property Appraisals Via the Internet

American Home Mortgage Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: AHMH), a top-five online mortgage banker, announced that it has formed a strategic alliance with realink.com Appraisal Network(R), a dominant online provider of real estate appraisals and mortgage services to the mortgage banking industry.

Under the terms of the agreement, American Home Mortgage Holdings will have access to fast and accurate online real estate appraisal services through the realink.com Appraisal Network. realink.com Appraisal Network is currently the sole provider of online appraisal services to American Home Mortgage Holdings.

"As we continue to grow, the need for faster, yet consistently accurate, property appraisals increases exponentially," said Michael Strauss, chairman, president, and CEO of American Home Mortgage Holdings. "The realink.com Appraisal Network allows us to quickly evaluate a property and be confident in the results. The whole ordering process takes only a few minutes, saving us time and money."

American Home Mortgage Holdings, Inc., based in New York City, is one of the nation's leading mortgage banking firms and was founded in 1988. MortgageSelect.com (www.mortgageselect.com), the Internet direct subsidiary of American Home Mortgage Holdings, allows its customers to review, compare, and accept loan offers from hundreds of the nation's leading wholesale lenders.

"Because realink.com Appraisal Network delivers a report directly to the loan processor's desktop within minutes of the appraisal being completed, significant time is being saved," said Michael Schafer, president of realink.com Appraisal Network. "American Home Mortgage now has access to faster appraisals that will allow the company to offer better service to their customers while simplifying the process."

realink.com Appraisal Network was established in 1982 as United Systems Software and evolved into realink.com Appraisal Network in 1999. The company's online appraisal service reduces the time it takes to receive a completed appraisal from one to two weeks to three to five days. It also expedites retypes, when a loan officer needs something fixed or changed on the report. Instead of a day or two to reproduce and re-deliver the report, the appraiser can hit send as soon as he completes the change and the loan officer will have it in minutes instead of days. With added features such as 24-hour, seven day a week access to order status information and automatic e-mail confirmation, realink.com Appraisal Network provides fast and dependable online appraisals.

About realink.com Appraisal Network

realink.com Appraisal Network is a division of realink.com, an e-commerce company specializing in on-line real estate appraisals and mortgage services to the mortgage banking industry. Its subsidiaries include United Systems Software Company. UNITED is the oldest appraisal software company in the U.S. and was the first in the industry to sign an agreement with Fannie Mae(R) for online appraisals. Another subsidiary is HomeValueNow.com (HVN), an advanced automated property valuation model available via the Internet for the real estate, appraisal and mortgage banking industries as well as consumers. For more information about realink.com Appraisal Network, contact Michael Schafer, at (800) 969-8727, mschafer@realink.com or write realink.com Appraisal Network at 617 South Rockford Drive, Tempe, AZ 85281, or visit their Web site at www.realink.com.

About American Home Mortgage Holdings, Inc. and MortgageSelect.com

MortgageSelect.com, launched in the first quarter of 1999, is the Internet-based subsidiary of American Home Mortgage Holdings (NASDAQ: AHMH). Located in New York, American Home Mortgage is one of the nation's largest mortgage banking firms with more than 700 employees.

MortgageSelect.com is currently ranked third in closed loan volume of Internet lenders (according to U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray), and has increased market share in every quarter since its launch. Over eighty percent of the firm's business volume comes through purchase mortgages rather than refinancing.

Because mortgages for home purchases typically close in a timely way, the company's specialization stabilizes its income stream. Refinancing mortgage companies, on the other hand, often find their closings delayed - and their incomes diminished - when rising interest rates persuade borrowers to forgo or delay closing their refinancing loans.

Like a mortgage broker, MortgageSelect.com offers customers the ability to compare thousands of mortgage programs and rates from hundreds of the nation's leading wholesale lenders. As a mortgage banker MortgageSelect.com can also directly lock-in, accept and fund any loan program a customer selects.

This press release may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the "Safe Harbor" provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are based on management's current expectations or beliefs and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those set forth in the forward looking statements. For a detailed discussion of these cautionary statements, risk factors and uncertainties please refer to the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.