Certified General Appraisers Pay Range

[Gobears81]

It's all a trade off, the nationals can charge more, but the overhead is much higher. A $6,000 appraisal would likely require anywhere from $500-$1,000 in travel expenses along with $100-$150 temp license (if not permanently licensed). Also, you burn an entire day traveling. You can still make money by leveraging the resources, but most people don't understand that the fees are necessarily higher for these reasons.

I don't think that specific appraiser was a national, but not sure. This property was just under an hour from my office and I quoted them $5,000, but in hindsight could have made more money per hour doing smaller, in-town commercial appraisals where most of the data is at my fingertips. Some appraisers like to talk about the large stuff that they've appraised and even though I usually think the fee quoted is solid on some of them, by the end of those types of assignments, there is almost always a notable drop in hourly rate. I'm sure he had quite a bit of the data used in the appraisal beforehand, but he still had to do some local market surveys, etc., and like you said, quite a bit of time/ money is lost in travel. Doesn't seem like a great business model to me, but maybe they have figured out how to make it work.

 

[Deleted member 152047]

If you stack them properly it can be, but it comes back to specialization. If you specialize, you probably already have all the data prior to touching the assignment.

 

[TRESinc]

I was told the guy is on the production side. I don't think he does that every year. Probably his best year. Unbelievable is right.

i have no clue about the commercial side but i know fees can and do vary wildly. back in novemeber of 2013 one of my main clients ran a huge special on rates for the month. it was my busiest month ever in over 20 years. 14-18 hour days, 6-7 days a week. it killed me at the end but in that month i did more than double any other month in my history. loved that check! anomalies can happen