Overimprovement
Senior Member
- Joined
- May 31, 2017
- Professional Status
- Certified Residential Appraiser
- State
- Kentucky
The only way to make it viable is to do a bunch per day, using economies of scale.
I had a small lender client that used me to take 3 exterior pictures of each home/business securing one of their port loans. Then I would do a two page 'condition' report that I created just for them for this purpose.
I charged $25 per inspection/report combo.
Now, if I stopped the post there, y'all would be all over me, for being a hypocrite for one thing. And stupid for another.
But, I left out the good part, I did ALL their loans, in two bunches each year. Each bunch had about 140 inspections. It was a local bank, with most of their loans within an hour of each other. I could get all the inspections done in about 10 hours--I google mapped them all, sometimes I would knock out 15 inspections in 30 minutes, but I averaged 15 per hour overall. I got REALLY efficient at categorizing the pictures and uploading them into reports. Reports averaged 5-6 minutes each. That's about 10 per hour. So figure about 25 hours total, maybe another hour for setup. That's somewhat over $100 per hour, and I got reimbursed for mileage as well, so that's just for time.
I would do that every day, all year long if I could, but the only reason it worked was I got all their stuff. If they spread that work out over 12 months, even $100 per report wouldn't move the needle for me. It has to have economies of scale to make it work. In fact, they stopped doing them late last year for most of their properties, only for loans over $500K, and wanted me to just do about 20 reports for them, spread out all over their coverage area. They were quite surprised when my price came in at over $100 each. Economies of scale. They passed. No biggie.
Are there now, or will there ever be, enough inspections to make these PDRs viable at low fees? I seriously doubt it. Even 3 or 4 per day, minus gas, insurance, and other expenses makes this no better than minimum wage type wages for most. I think the industry will quickly realize they are taking on new people every month if they want to try to pay people $40-$50 per pop. Especially at 2-3 per day max. No one will ever get 10-15 per day, there just aren't that many loans out there needing them.
I am not a fan of these for mortgage originations or even refi's. The GSEs are jacking around with taxpayer money, and I personally hope this program fails miserably. I am doing my part, I won't be doing any of these...but I get that each person has to make decisions best for them.
I had a small lender client that used me to take 3 exterior pictures of each home/business securing one of their port loans. Then I would do a two page 'condition' report that I created just for them for this purpose.
I charged $25 per inspection/report combo.
Now, if I stopped the post there, y'all would be all over me, for being a hypocrite for one thing. And stupid for another.
But, I left out the good part, I did ALL their loans, in two bunches each year. Each bunch had about 140 inspections. It was a local bank, with most of their loans within an hour of each other. I could get all the inspections done in about 10 hours--I google mapped them all, sometimes I would knock out 15 inspections in 30 minutes, but I averaged 15 per hour overall. I got REALLY efficient at categorizing the pictures and uploading them into reports. Reports averaged 5-6 minutes each. That's about 10 per hour. So figure about 25 hours total, maybe another hour for setup. That's somewhat over $100 per hour, and I got reimbursed for mileage as well, so that's just for time.
I would do that every day, all year long if I could, but the only reason it worked was I got all their stuff. If they spread that work out over 12 months, even $100 per report wouldn't move the needle for me. It has to have economies of scale to make it work. In fact, they stopped doing them late last year for most of their properties, only for loans over $500K, and wanted me to just do about 20 reports for them, spread out all over their coverage area. They were quite surprised when my price came in at over $100 each. Economies of scale. They passed. No biggie.
Are there now, or will there ever be, enough inspections to make these PDRs viable at low fees? I seriously doubt it. Even 3 or 4 per day, minus gas, insurance, and other expenses makes this no better than minimum wage type wages for most. I think the industry will quickly realize they are taking on new people every month if they want to try to pay people $40-$50 per pop. Especially at 2-3 per day max. No one will ever get 10-15 per day, there just aren't that many loans out there needing them.
I am not a fan of these for mortgage originations or even refi's. The GSEs are jacking around with taxpayer money, and I personally hope this program fails miserably. I am doing my part, I won't be doing any of these...but I get that each person has to make decisions best for them.
