It would be helpful if you listed the number of appraisals in each county used to come up with your average. You list fees for the counties I cover as being between $350 and $400 yet I have NEVER taken a URAR fee of less than $425 in the past 9 years.
If these are the average fees Mercury Network appraisers are getting, why would I want to pay $300 a year to sign up plus $13+ per order received? At least AppraisalColon only shafts me $10 per order when it gets delivered.
It's awesome that you charge above the median, and you get it. We encourage that of course. And recall that, as we've said repeatedly, this is the "plain Jane" fee for a base URAR. If you cover six counties, you (and others) may be adding in implicit driving fees, etc., and there are numerous add-ons that drive the actual fees up (FHA, 1004MC, etc.).
But also, your anecdotal experience may just not match the broad statistical results, at least not as of **last month**. Fees rise and fall and we all know the last few months have been hard on the market, so that could be affecting things compared to your memory of what's the "norm".
While we don't release counts per county for competitive intelligence reasons (this is still our proprietary data), you can do a quick spot check of even the asking prices for appraisals in the counties you listed (that's publicly viewable). Even the median **asking** prices are below what you're citing, even in your Grant county example (where the asking prices are lower than every other county even with a 2.5 hour apparent drive). They'd be $400, $350, $425, $445, $450, and $400 respectively.
It's unlikely that the **norm** is as high as you say if even the posted fee schedules laid out there publicly by appraisers covering those areas show rates that are highly reflective of what we published.
Like I said, you can use the data or not. You choose not to, and that's great -- it wasn't there to use before at all, so you can't be worse off than you have been if you just dismiss it, right? (And I don't mean that dismissively either; it's a valid choice. It's just data, after all.)
Likewise, you can choose not to use the Mercury Network at $13.75 per order, or XSites at various flat fees per year, or anything else that we develop for generating business. If it's not fitting your business model or you don't like the results, drop your XSite like a hot potato and turn down any Mercury Network orders. No marketing products are ever a one-size-fits-all solution. Your preferred methods may not match others', so don't get frustrated forcing a square peg in a round hole.
You seem to make a good living doing AMC reports at above median fees, apparently over AppraisalPort, so why change, or why get worked up over Mercury? (I assume that's what you were referring to at $10. By the way, note that they charge you $10 every time, whereas many of our orders are free to the appraiser; the net result over a year is about the same.) You've found something that works for you, and I wouldn't recommend straying from what you prefer.
Dave Biggers
Chairman
a la mode, inc.
