It took a few years, but licensing changed how lenders choose appraisers. Grant doesn't want to hear it, but the technology had an even more profound effect on how fee appraisers operate. In order to fully realize, someone would have had to have seen it for themselves going way back before licensing to actually see the before/after.
Prior to ~1992 I could not have operated in this region as a solo operator because the office machines were too expensive relative to the income I could generate.
Prior to1988 or so, appraisers were buying individual forms software for 1 form at a time. Dynamic Computing sold their DCSketch (for diagrams), DC-URAR, DC-Condo and DC-multifamily for $400 apiece. I doubt anyone else will remember, but they also sold a Lotus-based spreadsheet collection for doing long-form Discounted Cash Flow analyses and variations of the Mortgage-Equity buildups for capitalization rates. (also for $395). I have never used a J-Factor Mtg/Equity variation in any of my appraisal reports, but if a client had ever specified the use of one I had access to one in spreadsheet format.
Anyways, for the $395 you got a 5.1/2" floppy that you could run in a DOS operating environment on a 2-floppy PC-186. At the time a 10meg hard drive was expensive. Most appraisers couldn't afford to run or store internal files on their PC, everything was on a floppy, and you hoped both your floppies were working because if one failed you had to do everything over again. In this region the public records came on either microfilm or microfiche and it took a more expensive microfiche printer to print a page. Those machines were so kludgy that your subscription came with onsite service - they'd send a tech out to maintain and repair. That prolly happened a couple times a mnth.
When I was working for splits I always worked for at least 2 fee shops at a time. At the smaller one they had ~1000sf of office space, 2 printers and one viewer-only for the microfiche, and a medium sized copier with a small copier for backup. 6-7 fee appraisers + admin asst + principal. That's a lot of overhead.
Alamode and a couple others came along in 1988 with a complete forms package ($495 for everything). That was a game changer. 24-pin dot matrix printers got cheaper so those replaced the older printers.
Then the prices on hard drives and dot matrix printers came down, and shortly after that the prices on HP Laserjets came down to the point where an individual could afford to buy one. Alamode and a few others came along with an integrated forms package that rendered obsolete the pre-printed forms. And rendered obsolete the purchasing and operating appraisalware by the individual form. I think they might have driven Dynamic Computing out of the appraisalware business but I could be wrong about that.
And then 1990 came along and the appraisal data providers brought their data online. That was huge for our business. Dial-up modems and billing by the minute, but you had access to more and more of the data from the public records from different counties and MLS databases. Leastwise in this region.
The beginning of the end for the small fee shops arrived with the onset of licensing in 1992, but also with the CD-ROM. The ability to subscribe to public records and assessor maps on CD-ROM coupled with the laser printer came along at just the right moment for me because I got laid off at the bank and had to go solo as a new CG (every licensee was new at licensing back then). I could buy the appraisalware, subscribe to the MLS and public records feeds and print as many copies of every report as I needed to right off my own lasterjet (and a color bubblejet for my pics).
Because of the timing of the evolution of the technology I have never owned or leased a microfiche reader/printer, and I have never owned a copy machine. Those were two big expenses that a solo operator could not afford on their own, but which the onset of the laser printers and the CD-ROM rendered technologically obsolete, just as digital cameras later rendered 35mm film and 1-hr film developers obsolete.
In 1991 I could not have pulled all of that off as a solo operator, but in 1992 I was golden. And more economically viable than any small fee shop except for the MAIs. Had it not been for the onset of the personal computer, cheap hard drives, cheap laserjet printers and the availability of the data in online and CD formats I would have been forced to continue with fee shops indefinitely, whether as a minion or in starting my own.
Needless to say there were some MAIs in town who disapproved of the rise of appraisers like me. They kept all the big accounts but I got some of the small accounts, which was plenty for me.
My point being that most appraisers lose sight of the point that it wasn't just licensing that undermined the necessity of working in groups headed by "higher" status appraisers, but also the evolution of the office machines and the increased availability and access to the data.
