We never use trainee appraisers—all our appraisers have at least 15 years’ experience

Want to know the dirtiest little secret of the appraisal industry? Here it is...

You deserve to have an experienced professional performing your appraisal, from start to finish. That should go without saying—but shockingly, many appraisal firms use inexperienced appraiser trainees (a.k.a. “licensed appraiser assistants”) to do your appraisal start to finish—with little or no supervision.

Your appraisal then is essentially rubber-stamped with the signature of the senior appraiser you thought you hired to do the job.

This is simply making profit at your expense, since trainees work cheap—and sometimes they even work for free. It is allowed to happen because everyone has to learn the ropes—licensed appraiser assistants are supposed to be apprentices. But the reality is, it takes years of oversight and hand-holding to correctly learn the trade and earn your appraisal license—and most firms can’t be bothered with that. So they give trainees some basic instruction, then send them off to work on client appraisals.

Unfortunately, this means that if you hire a firm that uses trainees in any capacity, you just have absolutely no way of knowing who is actually doing your appraisal—and what kind of quality it will be. It could be the appraiser you thought you hired, with 20 years’ experience…or it could be a trainee with hardly any experience, and possibly very little oversight.

We never use trainees or licensed appraiser assistants in any capacity.

When you hire us, you are assured that an experienced, FL State Certified Commercial Real Estate Appraiser is doing your appraisal report from start to finish.

We are not an appraisal-factory for big banks

This is the ugly truth about most real estate appraisal firms.

Since most firms—big and small—rely on banks for a significant percentage of their appraisal orders, these banks naturally become the firm’s most important clients.

This is bad for you for at least two reasons:

1. Because these banks typically provide the firm with dozens of appraisal orders monthly, your order frankly means very little to them.
2. And because price and speed are nearly always more important to bank clients than quality and accuracy, this leads to an assembly-line-like production of low quality, often unreliable appraisals.

We don’t operate like this. The number of appraisals we do for banks represents just a tiny fraction of our total business.

In fact, if we were to never take another appraisal job from a bank, we’d hardly notice it. Most other appraisal firms would go out of business. This was a deliberate choice on our part—from day one, we decided not to be dependent on mortgage appraisal work from banks. Instead, we developed a truly diversified client list, providing commercial property appraisals for a variety of intended uses.

Most of our clients require appraisals for any one of a number of private, legal, or tax-related uses, rather than mortgage financing. As a result, we have better familiarity with your needs and situation.

And because of this diversification, we haven’t developed the bad habits that come from prioritizing speed and cost over quality and accuracy—habits that inevitably result in low quality, unreliable appraisals.

We guarantee our work

Most appraisers don’t. Having read the points above, you can probably understand why.

Knowing that your appraisal will not be challenged or rejected is as important as knowing it is accurate. Therefore, we guarantee our appraisal reports will meet the standards and requirements of the authority you’ll be submitting it to (court, IRS, or government agency), and be accepted by that authority.

We can offer this guarantee, not just because of our experience, but also because we’re Qualified Appraisers according to IRS standards and specifications—so you can have confidence with our appraisals if the IRS is involved. Other government agencies don’t have formal standards to qualify against, but we know exactly what they need, and always work to their requirements.

We treat you as a VIP

When you hire a company for an important job, you should expect to be treated like an important person. And in a boutique firm such as ours, every client and every appraisal is important to us. So we treat them as such.

We know from experience this is not the case at many big-name appraisal firms—where all but the very largest clients are treated like just another number.

Our clients have our office numbers, cell phone numbers and personal e-mail address. We make ourselves available day and night. When you call, we answer. Not a secretary who puts you on hold for ten minutes. Not a pushy salesman who knows very little about the intricacies of commercial property valuation.

We offer you a unique level of access and commitment—and we can usually do so at a lower rate than the big name firms, because we don’t have to charge extra to cover bloated operational costs.