RCA
Elite Member
- Joined
- Jun 27, 2017
- Professional Status
- Certified General Appraiser
- State
- California
“Why ‘Good Enough’ Is the Enemy of Professional Appraisal”
One thing I’ve learned after decades in appraisal is this:the best appraisers are not the fastest, and they are not the cheapest — they are the most consistent.
The ones who really stand out have rigid internal standards. They do not decide how carefully to measure based on the fee, the client, or how tired they are that day. They decide once — long ago — and then they simply execute.
That is exactly how I work.
My measurements are always taken in engineering units to 1/100 of a foot, using ANSI or equivalent standards. When possible, BOMA. When BOMA isn’t feasible — and in many large office buildings it isn’t — I still measure as rigorously as access allows.
I never “drop precision” because the job is small.
I never say “this one doesn’t need it.”
Why? Because the moment you allow yourself to switch modes, you lose discipline.
Here is what many appraisers do instead:
They treat measurement like a cost to be minimized.
So they round.
They eyeball.
They use fractions when decimals are faster.
They accept floor plans that don’t close.
They treat dimensional conflicts as nuisances instead of warnings.
That is not efficiency — that is drift.
Let me be blunt:
there is almost no difference in effort between writing 12′-3″ and writing 12.25′.
There is almost no time difference between setting your laser to 0.1 ft and 0.01 ft.
There is absolutely no excuse for creating floor plans that don’t reconcile.
But there is a massive difference in what you get back.
When you always measure to 1/100 ft and always build your floor plans to that precision, something remarkable happens:
the building starts talking to you.
Walls line up — or they don’t.
Rooms add up — or they don’t.
Shapes close — or they don’t.
And when they don’t, that is not a drafting problem.
That is the building telling you something about movement, racking, additions, poor framing, or settlement.
Low-precision methods hide those signals.
High-precision methods reveal them.
And here is the part people miss:
High standards feel slow only when you are bad at them.
Once you do it the right way every time, it becomes faster than sloppy work. You no longer have to think. You no longer have to remember which corners you cut. You no longer have to reconcile contradictions you created yourself.
Your system just works.
That is why I refuse to “scale down” my methods for low-fee jobs.
I don’t run a fast version of myself and a careful version of myself.
I run one version.
And it is always the best one.
I would be interested to hear from others who operate the same way —
who believe that real efficiency comes not from lowering standards, but from raising them so high that excellence becomes automatic.
I wonder if any others have the same attitude: Take the high road, always do the more accurate, athough more difficult, way until you become so proficient at it, it becomes easy under the adage "Practice makes perfect."
