Surprise! By a UNAMINOUS vote of TAF's board today, REVAA is now a "partner" of TAF.
It would have been nice to open this up for a comment period, but who cares what the peasants think?
Does anyone still believe independent appraisers have a seat at any table in this industry?
AMCs: If you are good enough, it is best to avoid not only AMCs, but Desktops, Hybrids and the like - for residential.
GSEs: Fannie May/Freddie Mac appraisals can still be good paying. In fact you can occasionally get a few high-paying aprpaisal orders through some AMCs. But the AMCs and GSEs more or less distribute your appraisals far and wide. That is to say: The world is full of copiers. Organizations with 100x times more money than you can always copy whatever they want from you. And they will. If you think you can sue them, you can, but they will probably win through better attorneys. Your only current defense is that most of these organizations can't do much with technology that is too advanced for 95%+ of appraisers to use.
Designations have questionable utility, at least without a corresponding skillset that includes R or Python, MARS and a host of other statistical packages.
I see room for new appraisal organizations and new designations more in tune with the modern world. But that to happen, will take time.
Notwithstanding that, the Appraisal Institute and other appraisal organizations still have many worthwhile courses and conferences. You will just have to pay more if you are not a member. You have to figure out what is more economical. If you have a designation, in a sense you might as well keep it. But they are really expensive to obtain. And I am pretty sure they will be worth less and less, in comparison to other more important skill sets. You really should have both. But that is a frigging steep slope and high mountain to climb. And the one argument against the idea is that you can probably do better as a non-appraiser programmer and analyst than as an appraiser type. That may change with time. Hard to say.
None of the appraisal organizations can compete with the universities or existing online classes when it comes to math, statistics, GIS or analysis courses. - There will eventually be some good advanced statistics for appraisal classes - somewhere way down the road.
BUT, I think those who acquire the advanced skills may just keep them to themselves, to make themselves more competitive in getting good appraisal assignments. Especially, if they don't think they can get high caliber qualified students, - good at analysis and math. In my opinion, appraisers who can handle MARS, R, QGIS, UML and a number of other CRAN packages, will be few and far between for the next 5-10 years. And the number of clients who need more than a rubber stamp, will be just as limited. And somebody with the right skillset could probably do much better in some other field.
So, I predict that appraisers
will see a number of shoddy simpleton R courses and the like in the comming years. There are plenty of AI scams coming down the road - especially for appraisers who don't even know what the "components" of AI are.
But the real thing, a good combination of high competence in real esate, appraisal, data mining, R, GIS and AI skills - that will be lacking - until there is some real incentive to make a living with such skills. Right now, there isn't. There may never be for the foreseeable future.
Who really wants the accurate value of anything anyway, when the world doesn't believe such a things really has that much meaning? Value depends so much on fate, luck, acts of God and so on. Well - there are some exceptions.
